Mechanical Engineer, Reliability

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

Monumental are looking for a mechanical engineer to mature our current robot design and enable us build out and deploy a thousand-strong robot fleet to build beautiful, bespoke buildings. Our robots are deployed on sites across the Netherlands and the UK and will be in the US within a year.

Most robotic applications require robots to function in controlled, clean environments. This is not the case at Monumental. Our robots must be reliable enough to withstand the harsh realities of a construction site: rain, dirt, temperature cycles and impact. This role will focus on improving the reliability of our robots, so that our growing fleet will survive months on construction sites with minimal maintenance. Expect to be regularly on site, so you know our product inside out. If you want an office job, this isn't the role for you.

For more context on building hardware at Monumental, read Niall’s Substack on why he quit his job and moved country to make robots to fix Europe’s housing crisis.

What you'll do

• Own making sure our robots can build on construction sites for months with minimal downtime. Like most things at Monumental, we track this using the number of deployment bricks laid. You'll get us to 12,000 bricks laid before a hardware failure.

• Rapidly understand how our robots work, the hardware that goes into them, and their failure modes. Systematically improve their design with respect to reliability, and conduct rigorous testing to validate the improvements.

• Own the loop from discovering a failure in the field to a validated fix shipped to the fleet. Root cause the failure, design and test the fix in the office, then validate it holds up in the field.

• Make sure R&D hardware is validated before it scales. Define validation criteria for hardware, design rigs for reliability testing, and raise the bar for validation within the hardware team.

• Work with the maintenance team, both in the office and on deployments. Find maintenance pain points and fix them.

What we're looking for

• 2+ years of experience in reliability and test engineering, ideally in robotics. You have taken hardware that didn't survive its environment and made it robust.

• Strong experience with environmental and mechanical reliability tests: IP, temperature, vibration and shock. You have designed and built the test rigs and run the analysis yourself.

• Experience making and repairing electromechanical assemblies.

• Experience shipping hardware from prototype through to medium-series production.

• Strong knowledge of GD&T, and producing 2D and 3D drawings.

Nice-to-haves

• BSc in Mechanical, Electrical, Manufacturing or Industrial Engineering, or equivalent.

• Examples of delivering complex electromechanical assemblies that operated at scale in harsh environments.

• Experience developing accelerated life reliability tests.

• Experience with electric motors, gearboxes, or actuators

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.