Monumental · Amsterdam
Head of People & Performance
Monumental is automating on-site construction with robotics and software. Our mission is to make construction software-defined and autonomous - a future where b...
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 an 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 and company. You might
enjoy Based in Europe’s film on how we’re fixing Europe’s housing shortage, or this video by Andreas Klinger of what our office
looks like.
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 the
get the 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
- 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.
- A problem-solver, first and foremost. You can take an ambiguous, high-priority project that doesn't yet belong to anyone, scope
it, and drive it to a result. This operator instinct matters to us as much as the people instinct.
- Numerate without being reductive. You can reason about performance and pay in numbers and hold a high bar with data, while
refusing to flatten people into a spreadsheet. You know which calls need a clear measure and which need you in the room.
- 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 we operate 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.
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.