GRC Lead, WorkOS

• A trusted advisor, internally and externally. You work fluidly with customers, engineering, legal, sales, and auditors. You can explain a control, defend a design decision, manage a difficult customer conversation, and communicate clearly, in writing
• A pragmatic, forward-thinker. You spot audit tight spots before they arrive, have the experience to work through them, and how to future-proof against them. You reason systematically about real-world impact, and ensure we reduce risk over checking boxes
• A strong partner to engineering. You build trust by understanding engineers' priorities and making the compliant path the easiest path. You act as the bridge between auditor asks and engineering work with the ability to translate between the two
• Framework-fluent. You have hands-on experience implementing and auditing SOC 2 and other major frameworks (ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP), and you can reason about new frameworks from first principles
• A builder, not just an operator. You see manual, repetitive GRC work as tech debt and look for ways to design it away: through process, tooling, AI, or partnering with engineering to build what's needed. You are not looking for a role where you chase screenshots and manage spreadsheets
• 5+ years in a GRC or compliance role, with demonstrated ownership of cross-functional compliance projects, from scoping through delivery, at a cloud-native company
• Hands-on experience implementing or auditing SOC 2 plus one other major framework (ISO 27001, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53)
• Experience building or significantly maturing a GRC function at a high-growth company; you have seen the zero-to-one arc, not just maintained a mature program
• Experience with GRC automation platforms (Vanta, Drata, or similar); migrating into, configuring, and building in them
• Strong written and verbal communication, particularly customer-facing advisory: explaining controls, handling objections, and managing audit and enterprise-deal conversations

Desirable

• The Security team at WorkOS is responsible for keeping the data and identities of hundreds of millions of customers secure. Security is fundamental to our products, and customer trust is the foundation of our success
• We are a highly collaborative group with a strong engineering mindset. Our security program is shaped by hands-on experience attacking and defending systems, and applying lessons from across the industry. We embrace the latest advancements in practices and tooling that make modern security teams effective
• Today, our team spans product security, cloud security, and detection & response. We are expanding our internal GRC function to scale our compliance, risk, and customer trust programs as we grow
• We are looking for a GRC Lead to build and own our Governance, Risk, and Compliance program
• WorkOS has foundational compliance in place; SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS SAQ D, and a growing set of customer and regulatory obligations. What we are looking for now is a leader for our compliance function: someone who can own our existing frameworks, drive us into the next tier of certifications
• You will work with security leadership to navigate our GRC program. You will help set the strategy, shape the roadmap, and build the systems and culture that make compliance a byproduct of how we build software
• Own our compliance function. Frameworks, policies, controls, and audits are yours. Make compliance part of how we ship software, not a separate track
• Lead our next certifications. Drive initiatives for FedRAMP and other frameworks; scoping the controls, documentation, and collaborating with others across the organization to make it happen
• Partner directly with customers. Be the voice of our compliance program to our customers. Support audits, enable sales on compliance-gated deals, and build on the trust we've established with the companies that depend on us
• Own risk across WorkOS. Run our risk and third-party risk programs. Identify risks as they emerge, drive remediation, and surface signal to leadership
• Scale through automation. Reduce manual toil wherever it hides. Design processes, tooling, and AI-assisted workflows so the compliance function scales without scaling headcount