Head of Performance

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 a 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 We're hiring our first Head of People & Performance to own how we attract, develop, and stretch our team as Monumental grows from around 100 people to several hundred over the next few years. You'll work as an extension of the founders - your job will be to get the most out of everyone and scale the judgment our team currently have in their own heads. It is integral to us that we maintain a startup culture that does not dilute as we enter our next phase of growth. You'll own the people side of how Monumental performs: who we hire, how we develop them, how we run our performance and equity cycles, and how we keep the bar high as the company grows. Our day-to-day people operations are already covered, so your job sits one layer above that, working directly with the founders and the leadership team. This is a hands-on, operator role. Like everyone at Monumental, you'll pick up the projects with the biggest priority at any given moment - the special projects that often span several teams and don't yet have an owner. One month that might mean standing up our performance and equity cycles; the next it might mean scoping how a new function should be staffed, reading where a team is overstretched, or untangling a problem that doesn't belong to anyone yet. The loudest internal conversations at Monumental are about how to do better work, and you'll help keep them there. You reach for direct contact and local knowledge over standardized process, and you distrust schemes that try to make people legible by flattening them. You should be obsessed with talent. You care more about whether a junior engineer is being stretched than whether the handbook is up to date. You can sit down with anyone in the company - software, workshop, ops - and walk away knowing what they're building and what's blocking them. What you’ll do - Special projects: Like everyone at Monumental, you pick up the work with the biggest priority, wherever it happens to sit. Some of these are squarely people problems and many aren't. You'll move across software, workshop, operations, and the deployment teams, take on the high-priority project that needs an owner, and see it through before moving to the next thing that matters most. - Turning team strengths into a hiring plan: You'll build a real read on where each team is strong and where it's thin, and turn that into who we hire next - especially as we work to strengthen the hardware side of the company. You'll partner with the founders on the senior hires that matter most, where you'll have a genuine view on whether someone will thrive here rather than only on whether the process ran cleanly. And you'll help scope which projects each person takes on, so our best people are consistently pointed at our most important problems. - Talent spotting, internal and external: Finding the people who'd thrive at Monumental before anyone else has, and pulling a high-potential operator out of a deployment and into a role that fits them better. You'll build "spot great people" into how the whole company works. - Performance cycles: Twice a year, with ad-hoc adjustments for exceptional growth. You'll own how reviews actually happen here: the conversations managers run with their teams, how we calibrate across them, and how cash and equity decisions tie back. Predictable enough to be fair, and loose enough that an exceptional contribution doesn't wait six months to be recognised. - Equity and compensation philosophy: A clearer framework for refreshers, comp bands, and how we think about cash versus equity at different levels, so that real ownership is felt across the team rather than only at the top. - Coaching managers: Especially first-time managers and IC-strong technical leads who haven't yet learned how to give direct, timely feedback. You coach them to have the conversation; you don't have it for them. - Supporting people who are struggling: Spotting the early signal and making sure people get the feedback they need to course-correct. These are the conversations companies our size habitually delay, and you make sure they happen, with care. - Soft 1:1s, redesigned: Our current cadence is stretched. You'll run a subset of these yourself and design the system that makes the rest happen well. - Scaling the people experience: As we grow past 100, some of the systems that worked on day one start to break - perks, spending freedom, onboarding, and more. You move on what's actually needed and resist adding policy for its own sake. - Leading the People team, including all of its future hires. What we’re looking for - You’re a quantitative operator - a Chief of Staff, BizOps/strategy leader, ex-founder, or founder’s-office generalist - who has owned ambiguous 0→1 problems close to founders. You may not have run “People” before; that’s fine, we’ll back you to learn it fast. If you have run People, you’ve built and managed high-performing teams and grown individual contributors into leaders - in a startup close to the founders, or in another demanding arena (sports, military, performing arts). Either way, you’ve taken something from 0 to 1 and owned the outcome. - Fluent with the numbers that matter, but never reductive. You can model comp bands, equity refreshers, and cash-vs-equity tradeoffs cold, and reason about their effect on the cap table - while refusing to flatten people into a spreadsheet. You know which calls need a clear measure and which need you in the room. - A problem-solver, first and foremost. You can take a high-priority project that doesn’t yet belong to anyone, scope it, and drive it to a result. - Suspicious of policy as a default mode. You don’t think the answer to most problems is a new rule - and this isn’t an HR-generalist or people-ops seat. If your instinct on a hard call is to reach for a policy or the individual’s comfort over the company’s result, this isn’t the role. - Genuinely curious about people’s work, not wellbeing in the abstract. - An instinct to connect people across departments. You spot where someone in Software could unlock something for Workshop, or vice versa, and you make it happen. - High personal intensity. You set the standard through action, not framework documents. You don’t block anyone. - You can run a 1:1 that someone walks out of energised - and have the harder conversations, kindly. - Comfortable in a technical environment. You don’t need to code, but you should enjoy understanding what an engineer is building. - You introduce structure without killing startup feel. - You can read the legal framework we operate in - bad-leaver events, long-term sick leave, contracts and offboarding in the Dutch context. Not a lawyer, but you know when to call one. - A Day 1 culture fit, with minimal steering needed. - Plus: comfortable with the people side of physical industries - the safety questions, cultural dynamics, and on-site realities of manufacturing and construction. Or you’ll close that gap fast. - Fluent in English; Dutch is a plus but not required. 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.