Head of Performance

About the role

We are 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 will work as an extension of the founders, embedding your judgment directly into how the company evaluates, grows, and rewards its people. Your primary ownership is the people side of performance, covering 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 scales without losing its scrappy startup character. This is a hands-on operator role where you will pick up the projects with the biggest priority at any given moment, especially those that span multiple teams and do not yet have a clear owner. You will be the person who ensures that the loudest internal conversations at Monumental remain about how to do better work, keeping the focus on direct contact and local knowledge over standardized process.

Key facts

What you'll do

You will specialize in turning team strengths into a clear hiring plan, building a real read on where each team is strong and where it is thin, especially as we strengthen the hardware side of the company. You will partner with the founders on senior hires that matter most, owning the view of whether someone will thrive here beyond whether the process ran cleanly. You will scope how new functions should be staffed, reading where teams are overstretched and untangling problems that do not yet belong to anyone. You will spot talent both internally and externally, pulling high-potential operators into roles that fit them better and building "spot great people" into how the whole company operates. You will own the performance cycles, running the conversations managers have with their teams, calibrating across them, and tying cash and equity decisions back to actual contribution. You will manage the special projects that span software, workshop, operations, and deployment teams, moving across priorities and seeing through the high-impact work that needs an owner. You will define and refine the equity and compensation philosophy, creating a clearer framework for refreshers, comp bands, and the balance between cash and equity. You will ensure predictable recognition of exceptional contributions while keeping the process loose enough that outstanding work does not wait for a rigid cycle. You will partner closely with the leadership team to keep the bar high as we scale, maintaining a startup culture that does not dilute as Monumental enters its next phase of growth.

Requirements

You must have experience owning the people and performance side of a growing company, turning team strengths into hiring plans and translating them into action. You must be comfortable working directly with founders and senior leadership, operating one layer above day-to-day people operations to solve ambiguous, cross-functional problems. You must have the judgment to decide who will thrive here, using that judgment to guide senior hires and priority staffing rather than relying solely on process outcomes. You must be obsessive about talent, caring more about whether a junior engineer is being stretched than about whether the handbook is up to date. You must be able to sit down with anyone in the company, from software engineers to workshop technicians, and leave with a clear understanding of what they are building and what is blocking them. You must value direct contact and local knowledge over standardized process, and you must distrust schemes that try to make people legible by flattening them. You must be comfortable managing performance cycles twice a year with ad-hoc adjustments for exceptional growth, ensuring fair conversations and timely recognition. You must be able to define and communicate compensation and equity frameworks, including refreshers, comp bands, and the cash versus equity balance. You must be aligned with working onsite five days a week in Amsterdam, as Monumental is explicitly not a remote-first company and believes that building robots and walls cannot be done from home.

Nice to have

Experience in construction, robotics, or hardware-heavy environments, and familiarity with mission-driven, fast-growing startups.

Practical notes

The role is full-time based in Amsterdam, requiring five days a week onsite presence. There may be travel expected within the Netherlands and to other European locations as business needs require. No specific visa sponsorship details are provided in the source material. The start date is not specified, and the compensation details are not listed in the source material.