About the role
Monumental is automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction software-defined and autonomous - a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings go up in a single day, with minimal labour.
We're a growing team of engineers, operators and technicians 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 chance to make an outsized impact on a problem that matters. From day one, you’ll be working with an experienced founding team, backed by a $32M Series B led by Khosla Ventures and Plural.
Monumental is based in the city centre of Amsterdam, in a beautiful facility with an fully equipped workshop and robot testing floor. We build the whole stack in-house - hardware and software, we're explicitly not a hybrid or remote-first company - you can't build robots or walls from home, so we're onsite five days a week.
Read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn about our vision and company. You might enjoy our YouTube Channel, Based in Europe’s film on how we’re fixing Europe’s housing shortage, or this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office looks like.
About the role
We're looking for a software engineer who wants to build full-stack software that can touch the physical world, not another SaaS product. You’ll develop and deploy software that controls fleets of autonomous construction robots. Full stack at Monumental is really full stack, covering everything from microcontroller firmware up to the web-based UI that operators use to control the robots. We’ve built CAD tools for designing masonry structures, path planning and motion control, telemetry and inspection tools, and distributed data storage and sync.
The technical challenges we're solving combine hardware, software, and infrastructure at scale - while maintaining high availability on construction sites. Atrium, our operating system for construction, is built with TypeScript and Rust. Much of our Rust code is compiled to WebAssembly, allowing our UI to interface directly with the same control code that we deploy to our robots. This gives us a shared stack between real-world deployments and simulated runs in the front-end. You can read about how we control robots with TypeScript in this post by our CTO, Sebastiaan.
As we're deploying more robots and software, we're always running into new challenges. The problems are often not straightforward: poor connectivity on a construction site because of interference, a memory leak that only becomes an issue after hours of runtime, a robot behaving differently than the simulation. This means a lot of creative problem solving is involved. One of our engineers even traced down a problem to a memory leak in Chrome, which got fixed soon after he submitted a bug report.
To help us build, improve, and maintain our platform, we're looking for a strong generalist software engineer. You'll get a lot of autonomy and the chance to build software that builds actual robots and houses. You’ll also get the chance to collaborate with other engineering disciplines (e.g. electrical, mechanical) to support new robot features or debug issues. For more on how we think about the role, read Bouke’s post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer.
What you'll do
Building telemetry that lets us see what every robot on site is doing in real time - so when something goes wrong, you know why
Designing the core architecture of our platform, and choosing the right abstractions to map the messy world of construction into elegant software
Prototyping components that talk to our robot's microcontrollers and distributed subsystems - shipping to production, onto a robot laying bricks within hours of writing the code
Debugging complex issues that cut across the stack: e.g. bugs in the Chromium GC; WiFi connection issues with robot systems or race conditions in concurrent Rust code
Writing Rust and TypeScript code that controls the robot in real-time, turning high-level goals into small steps that the robot can execute
Working collaboratively with our team of hardware engineers, control engineers, and robot operators to improve product experience, reliability and performance of our platform
What we’re looking for
- Industry experience building and deploying production systems in multiple languages (Rust experience is valuable but not required)
- You're probably the person everyone asks for help when an agent does something nobody can explain. You run them in parallel most of the time - to build, review code, catch security issues, draft incident reports. Not just vibe-coding prototypes.
- Basic familiarity with Linux systems and conventions. E.g., you’re comfortable SSH’ing into other machines to figure out why something isn't working
- Knowledge of common communication protocols, e.g. UDP, TCP/IP and WebSockets
- A strong sense of ownership and motivation. You’re able to drive problems and projects start-to-finish without someone project managing you, and can thrive in a chaotic environment.
- A high percentage of our software team have been a technical founder, CTO, or founding engineer before. If that’s your background, you’ll likely fit in. But we also get excited by people with a demonstrated background of shipping impressive work at any type of company.
- Strong CS or mathematics foundation– you are a strong geometric thinker, understand basic linear algebra and 3D transformations
Why Monumental?
Joining Monumental means being at the forefront of a movement aimed at making significant strides in the construction industry. Here, your work has the potential to impact not just the company but the future of how we build. If you're driven by innovation, eager to tackle complex challenges, and ready to make a tangible difference, we want to hear from you.
For open applications (where you don’t see an exact role match), please reach out to us at: iwanttojoin@monumental.co - share with us the most interesting or challenging project you’ve worked on, why you want to join and your CV or portfolio.
Unfortunately we do not currently support internships.
If you don’t meet all the qualifications here but are excited about Monumental and feel you’d still be able to help us solve difficult problems, do get in touch. We welcome generalists who focus on outcomes and are eager to learn on the job.