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Ent

Intent-aware workspace security platform

Senior Endpoint Engineer - Data Security

Full-Time
No salary listed
Senior
Remote in USA
Remote
CybersecuritySecurity Engineering & Architecture

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of experience shipping production systems software in C and C++, including work on an endpoint agent deployed at enterprise scale.
  • Direct experience building or operating an endpoint for an insider-risk, data-security, or Cloud Access Security Broker/Secure Access Service Edge data-protection product.
  • Strong operating-system internals knowledge on at least one platform, including file-system filtering, process and handle interception, and the user/kernel boundary.
  • Hands-on experience with content inspection and data classification, including pattern-based detection, fingerprinting and hashing schemes, file-format parsing, and handling archives and Office/PDF container formats.
  • Experience controlling device and network egress channels, including USB and removable media, printing, clipboard, and HTTPS upload.
  • Experience with multi-threaded, performance-sensitive engineering against measured latency and throughput budgets.
  • Strong debugging and profiling skills on real user machines, including application-compatibility investigations where the security agent is suspected first.
  • A precision-focused engineering approach with instrumentation to minimize product noise and false positives.
  • Clear written and verbal communication with distributed teams and customer-facing stakeholders.
Responsibilities
  • Build the endpoint data-protection layer of the Ent agent to classify sensitive data on the device, trace how it is created and moved, and enforce policy at the moment of egress.
  • Instrument and control exfiltration channels including removable media and USB, printing, clipboard, drag-and-drop, screen capture, network shares, Bluetooth and AirDrop, email, web and browser upload, sync clients, and AI tools and agents.
  • Implement on-device content inspection and classification using regular-expression and pattern matching, keyword and dictionary matching, exact and indexed document matching, fingerprinting, file-type and structure identification, and optical character recognition for image-borne content.
  • Integrate Ent's on-device small language model into classification and intent decisions.
  • Build data-lineage and provenance tracking that keeps classification attached to content as it is copied, renamed, transformed, archived, compressed, or re-encoded.
  • Implement or collaborate on interception plumbing using Windows minifilters and Event Tracing for Windows, the macOS Endpoint Security Framework and Network Extensions, Linux fanotify and extended Berkeley Packet Filter, and browser-extension hooks.
  • Build labeled corpora, measure false-positive and false-negative rates per detector, and tune classification quality with evidence.
  • Budget CPU, memory, and input/output for content scanning without blocking, delaying, or corrupting legitimate user files and workflows.
  • Produce forensically useful incident evidence covering who acted, what data was involved, which channel was used, and what intent was inferred.
  • Own customer escalations involving missed egress paths and application-compatibility conflicts, and turn recurring patterns into permanent fixes.
  • Partner with product, security research, artificial intelligence, and compliance stakeholders to map endpoint controls to regulatory regimes including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CCPA, and export-control requirements.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience applying optical character recognition, machine-learning-based classification, or embedding and large-language-model-based content understanding to data protection.
  • Implementation experience with data-lineage or provenance tracking.
  • Cross-platform development spanning Windows and macOS; Linux and browser-extension development are also beneficial.
  • Experience with encryption, rights management, or key handling on the endpoint.
  • Depth in regulatory compliance and audit-evidence design.
  • Experience with insider-threat investigation workflows or data governance for AI tools and autonomous agents.

About the company

Ent provides an intent-aware workspace security platform that preemptively prevents security incidents by interpreting the intent behind user and AI agent actions in real time. A lightweight endpoint agent and a browser extension monitor activity and compare it to corporate policies, triggering automated interventions before risky actions complete. It is hosted in the customer’s cloud and extends existing security stacks like EDR, SIEM, SOAR, and IAM rather than replacing them. Its goal is to help enterprises manage insider risk, govern AI usage, and prevent data loss for both humans and AI agents in modern work environments.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$100M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2025

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Ent raised $100 million on June 16, 2026, funding rapid product expansion.
  • Ent reported Global 2000 deployments in hospitality, financial services, and defense.
  • IQT backing and July 30 enhancements strengthen federal and enterprise credibility.

What critics are saying

  • CrowdStrike shipped browser, endpoint, and Copilot-agent controls on March 23, 2026.
  • Microsoft bundled Security Copilot agents into E5 and E7, commoditizing adjacent workflows.
  • Ent named no customers publicly; category risk kills sales if pilots stall by 2027.

What makes Ent unique

  • Ent runs AI reasoning on-device, judging intent before risky actions finish.
  • Ent hosts in customer clouds, preserving data sovereignty for regulated buyers.
  • Founders Elias Manousos and Brandon Dixon previously built RiskIQ and Security Copilot.

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Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Parental Leave

Company Equity

Wellness Program

Remote Work Options

Home Office Stipend

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-15%

1 year growth

-15%

2 year growth

-15%
Tech Funding News
Jun 16th, 2026
Ex-Microsoft duo behind Security Copilot raises $100M seed to catch AI threats before they strike — TFN

Ent, the endpoint security startup founded by ex-Microsoft leaders behind RiskIQ and Security Copilot, has raised $100M in seed funding to stop AI-era threats before they strike.

VMblog
Jun 16th, 2026
Ent emerges from stealth to bring prevention back to cybersecurity.

Ent emerges from stealth to bring prevention back to cybersecurity. Ent emerged from stealth with $100 million in seed financing. The company is pioneering a new approach to cybersecurity built around the simple belief that AI compresses the time between compromise and impact; prevention must once again become the primary objective of security. Ent's platform helps organizations understand and intervene in risky actions by humans and AI agents before they become incidents. Ent is already deployed with Global 2000 customers across hospitality, financial services, and defense. Customers use Ent to detect insider risk, govern AI usage, prevent data loss, stop last-mile threats, and investigate incidents with the full behavioral context of what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next. "Security has been stuck in a reactive loop for over a decade, but AI-powered attacks require new thinking," said Elias Manousos, CEO and co-founder of Ent. "AI is changing both how people work and how quickly attackers can act. What once took days now happens in seconds. By the time traditional security systems detect a problem, it is too late. We believe the future of security lies in understanding intent in real time across people and AI agents and stopping risk before it becomes an incident." Prevention requires a new layer at the workspace where work happens, across the browser, apps, AI workflows, and agents. Existing tools are blind because they collect at the wrong layer, tied to process and file events, and respond too late. As enterprises consolidate the platforms that protect endpoints, identities, applications, and data, the layer that reads intent across humans and AI agents in real time becomes the critical one. Ent operates at that layer. Hosted in the customer's cloud with complete data sovereignty, Ent runs as a lightweight agent that brings AI reasoning to endpoints. The platform observes behavior across applications, browsers, workflows, data movement, and local runtimes; evaluates human and AI agent intent at the moment of use, applies customer-defined policy, and acts through configurable, just-in-time interventions before incidents occur. The funding is led by Decibel, with participation from Sequoia, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Craft Ventures, Shield Capital, Felicis, and In-Q-Tel (IQT). "AI has been a killer app for hackers and offensive researchers, but the industry is waiting for a novel defensive solution that can keep up with the modern era of LLMs," said Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner at Decibel. "Ent has reimagined what is possible to protect the endpoint by using specialized AI models and adaptive policy enforcement to detect and prevent malicious activity in real time. It's a game changer for cybersecurity teams who need a paradigm shift to defend their workforce against LLM-based attacks." "For a decade, endpoint security has relied on signals that arrive after the user's action is complete," said Konstantin Buhler, Partner at Sequoia. "By running AI reasoning directly on the device, Ent moves from detection to prevention at the moment of decision. That shift is where the next era of endpoint defense gets built." "We have entered a new era defined by AI-powered attacks, one that demands a return to prevention and resilience," said Greg Clark, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Crosspoint Capital Partners. "The level of inference required to stop threats before they materialize must now live directly on the endpoint. Ent is leading this fundamental shift in endpoint protection." "We are working with agencies where AI adoption is outpacing the ability of most enterprises to govern it, and where forensic clarity matters as much as prevention. Ent gives them both," said Steve Bowsher, CEO at IQT. "They can see what people are doing with AI in the moment, and they have a comprehensive record of what happened on every device." Ent's team brings together engineers and security operators with deep enterprise experience. The company's advisors include former CISOs of Google, Aetna, and MassMutual, the former Director of the NSA, and the former CVP of Microsoft Azure Cloud Security. The new funding will support continued hiring across engineering and go-to-market, while accelerating Ent's roadmap across AI governance, threat prevention, security integrations, and multimodal endpoint intelligence. Ent is generally available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser-extension deployments. David Marshall has been involved in the technology industry for over 30 years, and he's been working with virtualization software since 1999. He became a pioneer in the virtualization and cloud computing field - one of the few people in the industry allowed to work with Alpha stage server virtualization software from industry leaders: VMware (ESX Server), Connectix and Microsoft (Virtual Server).Through the years, he has invented, marketed and helped launch a number of successful software companies and products. David holds a BS degree in Finance, an Information Technology Certification, and a number of vendor certifications. He's also co-authored two published books: "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center" and "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center" and was the technical editor for two popular Virtualization "For Dummies" books. With his remaining spare time, David founded and operates one of the oldest independent modern data center publications, VMblog.com. And co-founded CloudCow.com, a publication dedicated to Cloud Computing. Since 2009, and each year thereafter, David has been honored with the vExpert distinction by VMware by Broadcom for his evangelism.Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarshall/