Director, Talent & Performance

Ent Security

$150K — $180K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of direct experience in talent and performance management.
  • Proven history of designing and running a full performance cycle in a mid-sized company (100-500 employees).
  • Experience building job architecture or competency ladders and ensuring practical usage by managers.
  • Demonstrated use of agentic AI in people practices with measurable outcomes.
  • Strong understanding of performance metrics with the ability to present insights succinctly to executives.
  • Hands-on coaching experience with directors and managers in performance environments.
  • Knowledge of performance termination processes across multiple states, collaborating with legal partners.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement a continuous employee lifecycle connecting recruitment to onboarding, performance, and growth.
  • Collaborate closely with Talent Acquisition to integrate insights from the hiring process into onboarding and performance reviews.
  • Develop and maintain competency ladders across various job families to support managerial decision-making.
  • Lead the design and execution of performance and merit cycles in collaboration with the VP of People.
  • Utilize AI technologies to streamline performance tracking and reporting, reducing time spent on administrative tasks.
  • Ensure real-time performance metrics are accessible to leadership, providing immediate insights.
  • Serve as the primary People partner for directors and managers, leading coaching and performance conversations.

Benefits

  • Flexible remote work options across North America.
  • Equity opportunities allowing employees to share in the company's success.
  • Comprehensive health benefits with 90% of medical, dental, and vision costs covered, including dependents.
  • Flexible PTO policy for personal time and recharge.
  • Generous parental leave policy with 12 weeks paid maternity leave and 8 weeks paid paternity leave.
  • Monthly lifestyle allowance to support wellness and personal development.
  • Home office stipends for remote workers to set up an effective workspace.
Full Job Description
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.

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