Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer

Job description

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 https://www.monumental.co/our-vision/and company https://www.monumental.co/about/. You might enjoy Based in Europe’s film on how we’re fixing Europe’s housing shortage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Q2F0Fcx4A, or this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOo8n19XEns. About the role The typical startup advice to become an effective engineer is “go spend time with your users”. Our version of this is “go spend time with our robots in their natural habitat, the construction site”. It turns out to be very hard to sit in an office behind a desk and improve the behavior and performance of a robot, tuning kinematics, or scoping new features that interact with the messy real world of a construction site. We’ve found that the most effective way of doing this is being with the robot and being in a position where you can fix it yourself instead of asking another engineer to do it for you. Our FDREs own the technical side of deployments end-to-end. You will be a key driver in making every deployment successful, taking ownership of solving unknown problems in the field, building features that unlock higher productivity, and continuously improving our workflows to increase autonomy. Your work directly influences how many bricks we can build, how quickly we can deploy new capabilities, and how reliably our robots operate. Because FDREs sit closest to both the product and the customer, the improvements you make can have a direct and significant impact on the business, shaping how we scale our operations and deliver value. While helping us build beautiful homes faster, more efficiently, and autonomously. We don’t expect you to have prior experience with robotics. Our ideal candidate has excellent problem solving and debugging skills, combines technical skills with creativity, and can deal with high stress environments when things fail. You’re a strong engineer but above all obsessed with driving good outcomes. If you’re done with doing yet another SaaS job, this is a unique opportunity to bring yourself back into the real world: you’ll learn how buildings get built, how robots work, and be at the cutting edge of applied robotics. If this sounds interesting, you should read about Alfred's Substack, What happens when robots ignore construction rules https://substack.com/home/post/p-192589850 or Alex’s can robots build beautiful things? https://substack.com/home/post/p-195332038 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. If you're new to robotics, you might like reading Bouke's blog post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer https://bou.ke/blog/robotics/ and Josefine's interview with a seat at the table https://open.spotify.com/episode/4GqCgUpZviiR6JzEexVMtZ?si=kqvTXBnCQOWocfYxVeJC1A. What you’ll be working on - As a starting point, you’ll be comfortable building walls with our robots, similar to our Construction Robot Operators https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monumental/a1f0dacf-ae18-4b11-a24c-5437c9dab65b. - The topology of the site, niche project details, or edge cases that we haven’t dealt with before. It’s your primary responsibility to identify those issues and to own solving that start-to-finish: coming up with a solution, writing the code to fix it, deploy and test on a robot, and ensure rolling out to our entire fleet. We do this in fast iteration cycles of hours and days, not weeks. - Debugging failures that happen on-site: part of this is typical software & hardware debugging, but then have the product sense to develop a solution to structurally fix the problems you find. - Taking broader notes on things you’re seeing on the construction site and with our robots that you can’t take on immediately or yourself. 10-20% of this job is a bit like being a product manager, identifying new projects and opportunities that can be discussed with the wider team. - Being the face and ambassador of the company on a construction site. Our robots don’t talk so people will typically chat to you if they see you next to a robot. What we’re looking for - Ability to code: we don’t care if you’re self-taught, went through a coding academy, or have a M.Sc. or PhD in Computer Science. You need to be able to solve complex engineering problems with code and have at least 2 years of experience doing this professionally. - We don’t expect any prior experience with robotics, but being comfortable with basic mathematics (e.g., linear algebra) and reasoning geometrically is a strong plus. - Outcome driven mentality, you focus on solving the most important problem, not the most challenging or interesting one. - A natural sense of urgency, you ship fast and aren't precious about it - a scrappy fix that gets the robot building today beats the elegant one thats finished next month. - You are excellent at debugging and decomposing problems. Our stack is very deep, given that things can fail both in hardware and software, and you can logically reason through various failure modes. - You love getting your hands dirty and don’t want to sit behind a computer all-day. You will frequently wake up early to drive to a construction site on-time and enjoy being in that context. You don’t need to have any experience on a construction site though. - You’re fluent in English (spoken and written). - A British passport is a bonus. 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.