AI Risk and Governance Lead

About the role

Location: Remote: Eastern or Central Time Zone location preferred. Employment Status: Salary Full-Time. Function: Information Technology. Recruiter: Allison Schock.

Position Summary: The AI Risk and Governance Lead is responsible for establishing, implementing, and overseeing the organization's AI governance framework, ensuring artificial intelligence solutions are deployed responsibly, ethically, securely, and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and company policies. This role serves as the critical bridge between Legal, Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), Cybersecurity, Privacy, Internal Audit, Technology, Data Science, and Business teams to ensure AI solutions align with enterprise risk tolerance and regulatory expectations. The AI Risk and Governance Lead translates emerging AI regulations, ethical principles, and risk requirements into practical, scalable guardrails that enable responsible innovation rather than create barriers to business value. The role will establish governance processes, operationalize regulatory requirements, and ensure AI risks are proactively identified, assessed, monitored, and managed throughout the AI lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• AI Governance Strategy: Develop and maintain the enterprise AI governance framework, policies, standards, and operating model. Establish governance processes across the AI lifecycle, including development, acquisition, deployment, monitoring, and retirement. Lead governance committees and facilitate executive-level discussions regarding AI opportunities, risks, and compliance obligations. Define roles, responsibilities, decision rights, and accountability mechanisms for AI oversight.
• Regulatory and Framework Operationalization: Operationalize emerging AI regulations and industry-leading frameworks, including: EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), Responsible AI and industry best practices. Translate regulatory and ethical requirements into practical controls, standards, review processes, and implementation guidance. Monitor emerging AI legislation, regulatory developments, and enforcement activities and assess organizational impacts.
• AI Risk Management: Design and implement enterprise AI risk assessment methodologies and governance controls. Lead AI risk assessments with a particular focus on high-risk, regulated, customer-facing, and business-critical use cases. Identify, assess, mitigate, and monitor risks including: Bias and fairness risks, Privacy and data protection risks, Cybersecurity risks, Intellectual property and copyright risks, Regulatory compliance risks, Model performance and reliability risks, Reputational risks, Third-party and vendor risks. Develop and maintain an enterprise AI risk tiering model to classify use cases and determine governance requirements based on risk exposure. Maintain inventories of AI systems, models, and use cases.
• Responsible AI and Controls: Establish standards and procedures for: Human-in-the-loop review and oversight, Transparency and explainability, Bias testing and fairness assessments, Model monitoring and drift detection, Data retention and governance, Intellectual property protection, AI incident management and escalation, Ongoing performance monitoring and validation. Ensure responsible AI principles are embedded into AI design, development, deployment, and monitoring activities. Review and challenge high-risk AI use cases and provide governance recommendations.
• Vendor AI Governance: Evaluate third-party AI solutions, vendor-provided AI capabilities, and embedded AI tools through a risk, compliance, privacy, cybersecurity, and legal lens. Establish AI vendor due diligence, assessment, and monitoring procedures. Partner with Procurement, Legal, Security, and Privacy teams to assess risks associated with external AI technologies and suppliers.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serve as the primary liaison across Legal, ERM, Cybersecurity, Privacy,