Mechatronics Engineer

Monumental http://monumental.cois automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction primarily software-defined and work towards a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings are built within a single day with minimal labour. We’re a growing team (about 100 team members) of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and 1X. It’s still the early days of building the company, and this is a unique opportunity to be an early employee in a high-growth, high-ambition startup environment. From Day 1, you’ll be able to work with an experienced founding team backed by top-tier investors. Monumental is based near Artis zoo in the Plantage, in the city center of Amsterdam. We have a beautiful office with an in-house workshop and robot testing facility. We’re explicitly not a hybrid or remote-first company: we enjoy collaborating 5 days a week at the office. You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction https://www.monumental.co/why, and learn more about our vision https://www.monumental.co/our-vision and company https://www.monumental.co/about. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns. About you and this role We're building robots to bring automation to construction, making affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing possible at scale. We're looking for a mechatronics engineer who's a maker at heart, with a bias for speed and simplicity, who can design a robot on paper and build one in real life. In this role, you'll own entire mechatronic systems from idea through to production. You'll be involved in every stage of the engineering process: scoping broad, novel capabilities, running back-of-envelope calculations, and driving hardware design through prototyping, testing, and validation. This includes actuator and sensor selection, system integration and firmware development. You'll debug hardware issues both at our office and onsite, test on live construction sites, and iterate toward robust, scalable designs. Once you've proven you can own tightly scoped projects, you'll lead broader problem spaces with a small multidisciplinary team. The challenges are real: full on-site autonomy, construction-scale payloads, reliable operation at height, and millimetre-level positioning across our stack. We want people genuinely excited to tackle these alongside a capable, supportive team. Our approach focuses on identifying key risks and attacking them through rapid prototyping, not lengthy design cycles. You'll have high autonomy and minimal drag: few meetings, no unnecessary approvals. If you like the sound of this, you should read Niall's Substack about why he moved country to make construction robots to solve Europe's housing crisis. https://open.substack.com/pub/buildmonumental/p/i-quit-my-job-and-moved-country-to?r=68ngjs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true What You’ll Be Working On Imagine a fleet of autonomous robots rolling onto a construction site in the morning and by sundown, a fully built, beautiful home stands ready for a family to move in. That’s the future we’re building. Today, our robot systems are already constructing real homes across the Netherlands at scale. But we’re just getting started. Your work won’t be about incremental improvements, you’ll tackle broad and novel problems that unlock autonomous construction: - Pushing toward full robot autonomy for our masonry systems: automated wall-anchor installation and mortar pointing to produce beautiful brickwork. Autonomous lift platforms and fully automated material-supply enabling our fleet to work uninterrupted across large, messy sites. As our robot’s capabilities expand, you’ll also think through the safety implications and design appropriate mitigations. - Designing for extreme reliability: our robots need t