Head of Performance

Monumental is automating on-site construction with cutting-edge robotics and software. The company’s mission is to redefine construction through software and robots.

It is a growing team of mostly engineers and technicians, and it is still the early days of building the company. This is a unique opportunity to be an early employee in a high-growth, high-ambition startup environment, working with an experienced founding team backed by top-tier investors.

Monumental is solving the problem of on-site construction with a vertically integrated offering. It is a hard tech company doing real R&D, financed through venture funding. The company manufactures its hardware in-house, runs a fully equipped workshop, manages a complex supply chain, and deploys masonry robots to construction sites across the Netherlands and the UK.

About You and This Role

Monumental is hiring its first Head of Performance to own how it attracts, develops, and stretches its team as the company scales from around 100 to several hundred over the next few years.

You’ll own the people side of how Monumental performs: who it hires, how people are developed, how performance and equity cycles are run, and how the bar stays high as the company grows. Day-to-day people operations are already covered; this role sits one layer above. You’ll lead the People team, including Jo-An (Exec Ops) and Lucie (Office/Event Manager), and work directly with the founders.

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 have a 1:1 with anyone in the company — software, workshop, ops, robot operators — and walk away knowing what they’re building and what’s blocking them.

What You Might Be Working On

• Performance cycles. Twice a year, plus ad-hoc adjustments for exceptional growth. You’ll own how reviews actually happen at Monumental: the conversations managers run with their teams, how calibration works, and how cash and equity decisions tie back. Predictable enough to be fair; 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 by spotting early signals and making sure people get the feedback they need to course-correct. The conversations companies this size habitually delay — you make sure they happen, with care.
• Soft 1:1s, redesigned. The current cadence is stretched. You’ll run a subset directly and design the system that makes the rest happen well.
• Equity and compensation philosophy, including a clearer framework for refreshers, comp bands, and how the company thinks 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. You’ll have a real view on whether someone will thrive here, not just on whether the process ran cleanly.
• Scaling the people experience. As the company grows past 100, some day-1 systems 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, operated very close to founders in a small-to-mid-stage startup, or led a high-performance team in another demanding context — sports, military, performing arts, or similar. 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.
• 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. You can also 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 the company operates in — bad-leaver events, long-term sick leave, contracts and offboarding 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. Or you’ll close that gap fast.
• Fluent in English; Dutch is a plus but not required.

If you don’t meet all the qualifications here but are excited about Monumental and feel you’d still be able to help solve difficult problems, generalists who focus on outcomes and are eager to learn on the job are welcome.