Software Engineer, Product/UX
Monumental 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 (about 100 team members) of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, Meta and 1X. 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 enjoycollaborating 5 days a week at the office. You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn more about our vision and company. You might also enjoy seeing this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office environment looks like.
About you and this role
We’re looking for a software engineer to join our team. Someone who loves building products and is excited to build software that can touch the physical world. 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. Atrium, our operating system for construction, allows us to do everything from 3d reconstruction of a construction site (through photogrammetry), design 3d structures that will be built, up to the supply chain, path planning, and motion control of our robots. You can read about how we control robots with TypeScript in this post by our CTO, Sebaastian.
We believe our software stack is state-of-the-art and pushing the boundaries in multiple ways, but we have so far not spent sufficient time on making it actually usable for our robot operators on the field. You will help to own the product and user experience, working directly alongside our CTO. Because of the technical nature of our product, we believe this person should be a software engineer with a strong affinity for product, UX and design.
If you enjoy building software products from start to finish on your own, from sketching a prototype, doing a bit of UX design work, and actually implementing the code, this role might be a perfect fit for you. You’ll get a high level of autonomy and an opportunity to build software that will move real hardware around. For more details, you can read Tobias substack about Product Engineers.
Some of the types of challenges you might be working on:
- Building an in-browser, 3d design environment for various construction structures (e.g. walls, windows, door frames, etc.)
- Designing the optimal frontend experience for multi-robot command & control
- Build ad-hoc visualizations to help us understand where we are in time, space or other relevant dimensions.
- Bringing excellent software engineering skills to the table, and specifically writing clean, idiomatic and typed TypeScript/React code.
- Design and build tools to allow us to manage a growing fleet of robots, distributed across multiple sites.
- Learning how to interface with our robotics backend and in-browser WASM runtime, entirely written in Rust.
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 enjoy reading Bouke's blog post on his experience joining Monumental as a software engineer.
What you'll be responsible for
Taking a problem statement and converting it into a spec, mock design, or a quick and dirty prototype in code.
Prototype and build interfaces for internal use to run and debug running hardware.
Writing and owning clean, idiomatic and typed production-level TypeScript/React code.
Debugging and performing root cause analysis of memory leaks, crashes and other problems.
Working collaboratively with our team of hardware engineers, control engineers, and robot operators to come up with the best product experience for complicated problems.
Taking full ownership of a project, going from idea to prototype to finished project.
What we’re looking for
Proven experience in software engineering and building complex web applications in the browser in idiomatic TypeScript. Experience in React is a plus.
Experience with 3d graphics, ideally in the browser (e.g., Three.js or WebGL) or otherwise in other programming environments (e.g. Unity)
Experience with UX design. We don’t expect you to be super-star visual/UX designer, and to spend time working on user stories or conducting interviews, but you are able to design frontends without a team providing you with designs and specs.
Proven experience in building prototypes or products in a zero-to-one environment, on your own or in a very small team. This can be a side-project you’ve worked on, an indie app, or some other project you can show us.
Software engineering skills and best practices. You use git for version control, know how to do unit tests or how to automate deployment of your code.
Comfortable picking up new language and tools. Experience with Rust is a strong bonus.
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.
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.