Senior GRC Specialist

About the role

The Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team at Cohere operates as a centralized function within the Security organization, leading efforts across governance, risk management, and compliance. This role offers the opportunity to help build and shape Cohere’s compliance and governance foundation.

Responsibilities

• Build, implement, and scale compliance programs, controls, and processes across frameworks and regulatory requirements including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, ISO 42001, Product Compliance, and FedRAMP/DoD (+others)
• Support and mature compliance efforts related AI governance including work aligned to ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act
• Drive compliance readiness for FedRAMP, DoD, and related public sector requirements, while supporting broader enterprise and customer-facing compliance obligations
• Partner with Security, Engineering, Modeling, Product, Legal, and other cross-functional teams to translate requirements into practical, scalable controls
• Improve compliance operations through automation, tooling, and scalable workflows
• Help build scripts or lightweight tools for evidence collection, reporting, control tracking, and audit readiness
• Manage cross-functional projects, timelines, remediation efforts, and audit preparation
• Support audits, assessments, and customer or regulatory compliance requests

Requirements

• 7+ years of progressive experience in building and scaling compliance programs across multiple frameworks and regulatory requirements, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, with extensive experience in FedRAMP, DoD, and public sector or highly regulated environments
• Strong project management and cross-functional execution skills
• Technical fluency and comfort working with Engineering and Security teams
• Automation, workflow tooling, or process design; some hands-on experience with Python or similar scripting for lightweight automation is a plus
• Strong written communication, organization, and attention to detail

Qualifications

• Nice to have: Experience designing and implementing mature risk management frameworks, including FAIR, quantitative risk methodologies, and other structured enterprise risk models
• Consulting experience in regulated environments, including multi-jurisdictional compliance programs and regulatory requirements across the U.S. and international markets
• Experience with additional frameworks such as NIST CSF, NIST RMF, NIST AI RMF, CMMC, or similar standards
• Experience working in cloud-native, SaaS, or highly technical product environments
• Experience preparing reports, metrics, and presentations for senior leadership, including communicating compliance posture, program progress, and risk insights to executive stakeholders