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Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer, Internship
MonumentalThe NetherlandsinternshipVerifiedPosted 16 Apr 2025
About the role
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 40 team members) of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, and Meta, that are looking to expand the operational part of our business. We're still in the first 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.
You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn more about our vision and company.
About You and This RoleThe 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 behaviour 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.
This is a unique and new role at the intersection of engineering, product, and operations. It’s definitely not going to be for everyone: you’ll be wearing hard hats and hard-toe boots most of your days. You’re going to be running our robots, sometimes in our test environments in the office, and many times outside on construction sites.
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 actually learn how buildings get built, how robots work, and be at the cutting edge of applied robotics.
We are open to hiring for this position as an internship, with a minimum commitment of three full days a week and for at least 6-month terms. We are unable to support relocation for this role. Applicants must be based in the Netherlands and able to commute on-site to Amsterdam to be considered.
If you're new to robotics, you might enjoy reading Alfred's blog post about his experience joining Monumental as an intern.
We’re a growing team (about 40 team members) of mostly engineers and technicians, coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, Shopify, Tesla, and Meta, that are looking to expand the operational part of our business. We're still in the first 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.
You can read more on why we believe you should spend your time working on construction, and learn more about our vision and company.
About You and This RoleThe 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 behaviour 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.
This is a unique and new role at the intersection of engineering, product, and operations. It’s definitely not going to be for everyone: you’ll be wearing hard hats and hard-toe boots most of your days. You’re going to be running our robots, sometimes in our test environments in the office, and many times outside on construction sites.
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 actually learn how buildings get built, how robots work, and be at the cutting edge of applied robotics.
We are open to hiring for this position as an internship, with a minimum commitment of three full days a week and for at least 6-month terms. We are unable to support relocation for this role. Applicants must be based in the Netherlands and able to commute on-site to Amsterdam to be considered.
If you're new to robotics, you might enjoy reading Alfred's blog post about his experience joining Monumental as an intern.
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.
- Invariably, we’ll encounter many problems on each new construction site: the topology of the site, specific things that need to be built, or edge cases that we haven’t dealt with before. It’s your primary responsibility to identify those issues and to own solving them start-to-finish: coming up with a solution, writing the code to fix it, and deploying and testing it on the robot again. We do this in fast iteration cycles of hours and days, not weeks.
- In addition, you will likely take on building and testing new bleeding-edge features–they might speed up our robots, allow us to drive into tighter spaces, or build something robots have never built before.
- Debugging failures that happen on-site: part of this is typical software debugging, but you’ll also learn how to identify issues through the entire stack including electronics and mechanical issues.
- 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 do
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