Director, Talent & Performance
Ent · San Francisco
About Ent
Ent is the intent-aware workspace security platform for securing human and AI-driven work. Built to protect productivity, the new attack surface, Ent understands not just what users and agents do but why, and intervenes at the moment of risk before incidents occur. Where existing tools see events, Ent sees intent, so security teams can step in at the moment of risk instead of investigating days later. Founded by Lou Manousos and Brandon Dixon, co-founders of RiskIQ (acquired by Microsoft) and the team behind Microsoft Security Copilot, Ent is in production with Global 2000 customers across hospitality, financial services, and defense, and backed by Decibel, Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel. We're now hiring the team that will define this category.
How We Work
Customer first. The product and the business are built around problems we've watched real security teams struggle with, not the other way around. Every roadmap conversation starts with what a CISO told us last week.
Humble. No drama. We hire people who share the mission and trust each other to deliver. Teamwork over showmanship. Accountability over politics. The work speaks louder than the person doing it.
Urgency. The window to build a durable security company in the AI era is open right now and it will not stay open. The shot clock has started. We move at the speed of the people we want to protect.
About the Role
Ent is an early-stage, rapidly-growing company (1 to 100+ people within its first year), and the systems that guide a manager on how to lead their team must catch up. This gap is your opportunity. Ent's first Director, Talent & Performance, reporting to the VP of People, gets to design the employee lifecycle most people in our field only argue about on panels: one continuous system running from the close of the recruitment process through onboarding, leveling, performance, and growth, built on AI rails. Agents will carry the work that was never meant to be human work, the prep, the assembly, the chasing, and the reporting. In this world, managers get their time back and human discernment sits exactly where it belongs, on the calls that shape a career and the moments an employee remembers.
The advantage of one system is we get to iterate and improve as we scale. What we notice about someone's strengths and gaps in their first interview becomes what we coach in month three, what shows up in their first review, and what we change about who we hire next. Most people systems throw that signal away. Yours will be built to catch it and get sharper every cycle. You will build it inside an AI security company, in a space that is ripe for innovation, which means the mandate to build people practice with agents is already here and you will not spend a year selling anyone on it. We are looking for a fast scaler, someone who moves at the speed of the business and would rather ship something excellent in real conditions than something perfect in a doc.
What You'll Achieve
You'll design one continuous employee lifecycle, where how we hire connects to how we onboard, level, review, and grow people, so someone's first conversation with us and their first promotion run on the same system.
You'll partner with Talent Acquisition to close the loop between hiring and everything after it. TA owns the hiring process. You'll turn what we learn about someone along the way, their strengths, their gaps, where we expect them to make impact, into signal that follows them into onboarding and performance, then feeds back into who we hire next. The goal is a system that improves itself rather than resetting at the offer.
You'll own our competency ladders, job family by job family, so every manager can make a level call and defend it. Everything downstream measures against these.
You'll design and run our performance cycle, and partner with the VP of People on the merit cycle that follows it.
You'll put agentic AI to work inside these practices, so review prep, calibration analysis, and performance reporting take hours instead of weeks, with clear human checkpoints on anything that touches a rating, someone's pay, or their job.
You'll own the performance metrics our leadership team sees, and keep them current enough to answer a question the same day it's asked.
You'll be the People partner for every director and manager here. Their coaching, their performance conversations, their hard calls. You're their first call, not their escalation. The VP of People holds that same relationship with our leadership team.
You'll build our managers' capability to run this well: writing reviews with real evidence in them, coming to calibration prepared, making level calls that hold up.
You'll hold the calibration line, including when a leader wants an exception for their person.
What You'll Bring
Must-haves
Talent and performance is your expertise, not one of several things you've touched. You've designed and personally run a full performance cycle at a company between 100 and 500 people. Build phase, not administering a system someone else designed.
You've built job architecture or competency ladders from scratch across multiple job families, and gotten managers to actually use them.
Ideally you've also seen this work at real scale, at 500 people or more. You know what the thing you're building at 100 has to become, so you build toward it instead of into a corner.
You can show us agentic AI you've put to work inside a people practice, with performance at the center of it. Not AI-assisted drafting. We want the workflow. What it ran on, what it produced, where you kept a human in the loop, and what measurably changed.
You're fluent in performance metrics. You know what's worth measuring about a cycle, a manager, and an org, and you report it in a way that gets an executive to act.
You've coached directors and managers directly, not just trained them, and facilitated calibration with senior leaders.
You've carried performance cases through to termination, across more than one state, with a legal partner rather than instead of one.
You build the 80% version that ships, not the enterprise version that doesn't.
Bonus
You've stood up a talent management system rather than inherited one.
Multi-country experience, including employer-of-record arrangements.
You've worked inside a company that doubled headcount in under 18 months.
You've partnered with a quota-carrying sales org on ramp and performance management.
Not required
You don't need to be an expert across every people discipline. Comp architecture, benefits, HR compliance, and HR systems are covered here, and the VP of People is hands-on alongside you. We'd rather have someone unusually strong on partnership, ladders, performance, and building with agents than someone broadly competent at everything.
Our Benefits
Distributed workplace. While we have positions we hire for in our SF office, we also hire remotely across North America.
Own a piece of the journey. Every teammate gets meaningful equity on top of their salary.
We've got you covered. 90% of your medical, dental, and vision is paid by Ent. We also cover 75% for your dependents.
Take the time you need. Our flexible PTO lets you recharge, travel, or just take a breather.
Family matters. 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave (birth, adoption, or foster) and 8 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
Live well. A $100 monthly lifestyle account to spend on what keeps you healthy and happy: fitness, wellness, learning, and more.
Set up your space. A $500 home office stipend when you join as a remote employee.
Diversity & Accommodations
We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize there is no single path to success and value nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.
We strive to ensure an inclusive experience at every stage of hiring and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our process, please let your recruiter know. As an equal opportunity employer, our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you do your best work. If there's anything we can do to improve your experience, we're always open to feedback.