Head of Governance, Risk and Compliance
IFS · London, England, United Kingdom · hybrid
IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.
At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.
We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.
By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.
We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.
If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.
We are hiring a Head of Governance, Risk and Compliance for our Trust and Intelligence organization a strategic leadership role accountable for establishing governance frameworks, managing enterprise risk, and ensuring regulatory and compliance adherence across the company. You will define how we operate responsibly and compliantly while enabling business growth, and you will lead a growing team across compliance, policy, audit, and emerging technology governance. This includes establishing governance frameworks for agentic AI systems ensuring responsible development, security, transparency and regulatory compliance as autonomous agents become core to our product strategy.
Role overview
As Head of Governance, Risk and Compliance, you own the governance, risk and compliance framework across the entire organization. You are accountable for ensuring that Product and Technology, Finance, Operations, Customer Success and all business functions operate in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, contractual obligations, industry standards and internal policies.
You serve as the central point of accountability for compliance risk, regulatory relationships, audit management, risk governance, policy frameworks, and board-level reporting. This includes establishing governance frameworks for emerging technologies, particularly agentic AI systems, to ensure responsible development, security, transparency, auditability, and regulatory adherence.
Your mandate is to transform compliance from a reactive, audit-driven function into a proactive, integrated capability that embeds compliance into business processes, enables informed risk-taking, and positions governance as a strategic enabler rather than a constraint. You will work closely with Product and Technology, Finance, Security Operations, Observability, AI/ML teams, Legal, Human Resources, and executive leadership. Success requires balancing rigorous oversight with business enablement, and building cross-functional ownership of compliance responsibilities across the organization.
Duties and accountabilities
Regulatory compliance and risk management
- Maintain current understanding of applicable regulations across all business functions (data protection, privacy, financial, industry-specific, contractual obligations) and monitor regulatory changes to anticipate impact.
- Conduct regulatory gap assessments, compliance audits and controls testing to identify compliance risks and remediation needs.
- Develop compliance roadmaps with clear implementation timelines and success criteria for achieving and maintaining regulatory adherence.
- Manage regulatory relationships and lead audit coordination, audit preparation, and audit response across all regulatory bodies.
- Establish incident response and breach of notification procedures; lead response to compliance incidents and regulatory violations.
Enterprise risk governance and assessment
- Define risk governance frameworks, risk appetite statements and tolerance thresholds aligned with business strategy and stakeholder expectations.
- Lead enterprise risk assessments across Product, Technology, Finance, Operations and Customer Success to identify strategic, operational, financial, technology and emerging technology risks.
- Establish risk governance forums with business leaders to review, prioritize and escalate material risks to executive and board leadership.
- Own risk reporting to Board and executive leadership, with clear risk status, trends and mitigation progress.
- Drive risk mitigation initiatives and track remediation of identified risks through to closure.
Policy, governance and control framework
- Develop, maintain and communicate organizational policies covering data protection, privacy, security, financial, operational and conduct requirements.
- Establish control frameworks, control standards and control testing procedures aligned with regulatory and business requirements.
- Define governance forums, decision authority, escalation procedures and approval workflows for compliance-related decisions.
- Monitor compliance with organizational policies through assessments, audits and exception management.
- Manage policy exceptions and waivers with clear approval authority, risk assessment and remediation planning.
Agentic AI and emerging technology governance
- Establish governance frameworks and development standards for agentic AI systems, including responsible AI principles, transparency and auditability requirements.
- Monitor emerging AI regulations (EU AI Act, sector-specific AI requirements) and anticipate regulatory impact on agent development roadmaps.
- Partner with Product and Technology to establish agent security controls, addressing prompt injection, data exposure, unintended behavior and hallucination risks.
- Define audit and observability requirements for agentic systems, including decision logging, behavior monitoring and explainability standards.
- Conduct risk assessments of high-risk agent use cases; identify potential harms and mitigation strategies before deployment.
- Establish agent development gates and approval processes for autonomous agent deployments; maintain emerging technology risk registry.
Compliance enablement and culture
- Build compliance capacity across the organization through training, guidance, and compliance support.
- Partner with Product and Technology to embed compliance and emerging technology governance requirements into product roadmaps and architecture decisions.
- Provide trusted compliance advice to business leaders on regulatory implications of new products, partnerships, business models, and agent deployments.
- Drive a compliance culture where ownership is distributed across the organization, not siloed in compliance; position governance as business enablement.
Regulatory compliance and risk management
- Maintain current understanding of applicable regulations across all business functions (data protection, privacy, financial, industry-specific, contractual obligations) and monitor regulat