Software Engineer, Generalist
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 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
Monumental are automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Atrium, our operating system for construction, lets us do everything from building walls with our robots, to designing buildings, managing our robot fleet, analyzing data, and much more. Our stack is broad by necessity: we use Rust for many things from robot middleware to back-end services, TypeScript across our web app and internal tools, and NixOS to manage our servers as well as the computers in our robots.
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.
Additionally, because we're scaling our operations, the scope of our software also keeps growing. We're now building internal apps for scheduling robot operators, planning site logistics and maintenance, and improving manufacturing. To make these applications possible, we need well-architected software and reliable software infrastructure.
To help us build, improve, and maintain our platform, we're looking for a strong generalist software engineer. Full stack at Monumental is really full stack, from the firmware for our robot's actuators to our in-house document database. 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
Shipping features across the full stack from robot firmware and Rust services up through the web UI, touching multiple layers.
Hardening production systems by tracking down subtle bugs like memory leaks, network backpressure issues, or race conditions that only show up in real deployments.
Owning our infrastructure end-to-end (bare-metal servers, NixOS configs, deploy tooling, …) so that shipping changes to a robot on-site or a service is fast and reliable.
Building observability across our entire fleet so when something goes wrong on a robot or a service, the team immediately knows where to look and why.
Building tools that multiply the whole team's effectiveness such as debugging tools, data visualization tools, or a platform that allows non-technical people to create their own apps.
Improving our data infrastructure, from our in-house typed document database to ClickHouse.
What we’re looking for
Industry experience building and deploying production systems in multiple languages (Rust experience is valuable but not required)
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.
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 and WebSockets
Strong CS or mathematics foundation. Understanding basic linear algebra and 3D transformations is a strong plus.
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.
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: [email protected] - 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.