Head of Performance

Monumental is automating on-site construction with cutting-edge robotics and software. Our mission is to redefine construction through software and robots. We aim for a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings are built within a single day with minimal labor.

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.

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 hiring our first Head of Performance - the person who’ll own how we attract, develop, and stretch our team as Monumental scales from ~100 to several hundred over the next few years.

Monumental is a unique company in that we’re solving the problem of on-site construction with a vertically integrated offering. We’re a hard tech company doing real R&D, financed through venture funding. We manufacture our hardware in-house, run a fully equipped workshop, manage a complex supply chain, and deploy masonry robots to construction sites across the Netherlands and the UK.

You’ll own the conditions for high performance at Monumental: who we hire, how we develop them, how we give feedback, how we run performance and equity cycles, and how we keep the bar high as the company grows. We've covered our day-to-day people operations - your job sits one layer above. You’ll lead our People team, including Jo-An (Exec Ops) and Lucie (Office/Event Manager), and work directly with our founders.

We’re skeptical of how people-management gets handled at most companies. Six months after hiring a head of people, the loudest internal conversations are often about vacation policy and perks rather than how to do better work. That’s a culture failure dressed up as professionalization.

We want someone who instinctively distrusts schemes that try to make people legible by flattening them - someone who believes in direct contact, local knowledge, and resisting the urge to standardize prematurely. Light process, applied judiciously, in service of people doing the best work of their careers.

You should be obsessed with talent. You should care more about whether a junior engineer is being stretched than whether the handbook is up to date. You should be the kind of person who can have an energising 1:1 with anyone in the company - software, workshop, ops, robot operators - and walk away knowing what they’re building, what they’re stuck on, and who else in the company could unlock something for them.

What You Might Be Working On

• Performance cycles. Designing and running the cadence - twice a year, plus ad-hoc adjustments for exceptional growth. You’ll own how performance reviews actually happen at Monumental: the conversations managers run with their teams, how we calibrate across the company, and how cash and equity decisions tie back to it. Structured enough to be fair, predictable, and defensible; loose enough that an exceptional contribution doesn’t wait six months to be recognised.

• 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; you don’t do the conversation for them.

• Supporting people who are struggling. Spotting early signal, making sure feedback gets to people on time, and helping them get back on track. The conversations companies our size habitually delay - you make sure they happen with care, and that the person leaves with a clear picture of what good looks like.

• Soft 1:1s, redesigned. Our current cadence is stretched. You’ll run a subset directly and design the system that makes the rest happen well - energising, not administrative.

• Equity and compensation philosophy. A clearer framework for refreshers, comp bands, and how we think about cash vs equity at different levels.

• Talent spotting. Internal and external. Finding people who’d thrive at Monumental before anyone else has. Pulling a high-potential operator out of a deployment into a role that fits them better. Building “spot great people” into how the company works.

• Senior hiring partnership. Working with founders on the senior hires that matter most - not just running the process, but having a real view on whether someone will actually thrive here.

• Scaling the people experience. As we grow past 100, some day-1 systems might start breaking: employee perks, spending freedom, onboarding, among other things. You move on what’s actually needed, and resist adding policy for its own sake.

• Leading the People team, including all future hires.

What we’re looking for

• Experience building and managing high-performing teams. You’ve ideally founded a company, or operated very close to founders in a small-to-mid-stage startup. You’ve taken a team from 0 to 1 and developed individual contributors into leaders.

• Suspicious of policy as a default mode. You don’t think the answer to most problems is a new rule.

• Genuinely curious about people’s work. Not wellbeing in the abstract - what they’re building, what they’re stuck on, what they think is going wrong, and who else in the company could help.

• An instinct to connect people across departments. You spot where someone in Software could unlock something for Workshop, or vice versa, and you make the connection happen.

• High personal intensity. You set the standard through action, not through framework documents. You’re the kind of person who’s never blocking anyone.

• You can run a 1:1 that someone walks out of energised. You can also have the harder conversations, kindly, without flinching.

• Comfortable in a technical environment. You don’t need to code, but you should genuinely enjoy understanding what an engineer is actually building.

• You introduce structure without killing startup feel. Suspicious of premature legibility.

• You can read the legal framework we operate in - bad-leaver events, long-term sick leave, and how contracts and offboarding work in the Dutch context. You don’t need to be a lawyer, but you should 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 work are familiar to you - 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 - tell us about a moment where you saw something that needed fixing and you just fixed it, without waiting for permission or checking if it was your job. What was it, and what did you do?

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.

A note on timing: we’re not starting first screening calls before 10 June. You’re welcome to apply now - we’ll be in touch from then.