Director, Talent & Performance

Ent • San Francisco, CA

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• Expertise in talent and performance management, with experience designing and running a full performance cycle at a company between 100 and 500 people.
• Experience building job architecture or competency ladders from scratch across multiple job families and ensuring manager adoption.
• Demonstrated experience implementing agentic AI within a people practice, specifically with performance management, including workflow, output, human checkpoints, and measurable changes.
• Fluency in performance metrics, understanding what is worth measuring and reporting it effectively to drive executive action.
• Experience coaching directors and managers directly and facilitating calibration with senior leaders.
• Experience managing performance cases through to termination, across multiple states, in partnership with legal counsel.
• A focus on building the 80% version that ships, rather than an overly complex enterprise version.

Nice To Haves

• Experience standing up a talent management system rather than inheriting one.
• Multi-country experience, including employer-of-record arrangements.
• Experience working within a company that doubled headcount in under 18 months.
• Experience partnering with a quota-carrying sales organization on ramp and performance management.

Responsibilities

• Design one continuous employee lifecycle, where how we hire connects to how we onboard, level, review, and grow people.
• Partner with Talent Acquisition to close the loop between hiring and everything after it, turning hiring learnings into signal that follows employees into onboarding and performance, and feeds back into hiring decisions.
• Own competency ladders, job family by job family, so every manager can make and defend a level call.
• Design and run the performance cycle, and partner with the VP of People on the merit cycle.
• Implement agentic AI within people practices for tasks like review prep, calibration analysis, and performance reporting, ensuring human checkpoints on ratings, pay, or job status.
• Own and maintain performance metrics for the leadership team, ensuring they are current enough to answer questions promptly.
• Serve as the People partner for directors and managers, providing coaching on performance conversations and difficult decisions.
• Build managers' capability in areas such as writing reviews with evidence, preparing for calibration, and making sound level calls.
• Hold the calibration line, including managing requests for exceptions.

Benefits

• Distributed workplace with remote hiring across North America.
• Meaningful equity for every teammate.
• 90% of medical, dental, and vision insurance paid by Ent, with 75% coverage for dependents.
• Flexible PTO.
• 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave (birth, adoption, or foster).
• 8 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• A $100 monthly lifestyle account for fitness, wellness, learning, and more.
• A $500 home office stipend for remote employees.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed