Software Engineer, Controls

Monumental http://monumental.co/ is 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 of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and Google DeepMind. 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 looking for software engineers with deep knowledge of software engineering and controls engineering to join our team. Help us bring our robots to life and join our mission to bring automation to the construction industry to create affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing for everyone. At Monumental, we’re building an operating system to make on-site construction possible with robotics. Our software stack allows us to do everything from 3D reconstruction (through photogrammetry) of a construction site, design of 3D structures that will be built, supply chain, path planning, and inverse/forward kinematics of our robots. Some of the types of challenges you might be working on: 1. Designing and modeling a localization and control system for our autonomous ground vehicles that can move around a construction site 2. Designing or optimizing specific control loops, e.g. for mortar flow control through different sensors (e.g. a load cell, or time-of-flight sensors) 3. Design and explore adding a new degree of freedom to the system 4. Implementing production-level code at whatever level makes sense (embedded firmware in C++, or our application layer in Rust) necessary to bring your algorithms to life. Help us bring our robots to life and join our mission to bring automation to the construction industry to create affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing for everyone. You might enjoy reading Bouke's blog post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer https://bou.ke/blog/robotics/. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns. What you'll be responsible for - Design and implementation of controls algorithms, both prototype quality for early experiments and production quality for real-world use. We expect you to write C, C++, Rust or Python code, not doing simulations in Matlab. - Design and implement localization algorithms (e.g., visual-inertial SLAM) and ensure we use the right sensors and logic to figure out where we are in world-space, using sensor fusion when required. - Design and build tools that allow debugging, analysis, and performance evaluation of your algorithms. - Bringing software engineering best practices to our team. You should be able to write production-level code that will stand on its own. - Root cause analysis and general debugging skills whenever things fail. - Taking full ownership of a project, going from idea to prototype to finished project. What we’re looking for - Experience implementing algorithms for the calibration and motion control, and path plan