AI Compliance and Governance Specialist

AI Compliance and Governance Specialist

Department: IT

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Cape Town

Reporting To: Stephen Smith

Description

At Sabio Group, we're building the next generation of AI-powered customer experience for some of the world's most demanding enterprise brands. We deliver significant volumes of agentic AI, LLM and conversational solutions into regulated industries - which means governance and compliance aren't a back‑office function for us, they're a competitive advantage and a customer expectation.

We're hiring an AI Compliance & Governance Specialist to join our Internal AI Team and add capacity to our existing governance and compliance function. We're already ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certified, we operate under the EU AI Act, and we're working towards ISO 42001. You'll play a key part in evolving that posture - across the solutions we ship to customers, the policies and procedures we run internally, and the way we evidence trust to regulators and clients.

This is a hands‑on role for someone who is genuinely curious about AI, comfortable using AI tooling to amplify their own output, and thoughtful about how to govern it responsibly. It's a fun, fast‑paced environment with a high‑growth business area behind it - and a strong remit to shape how AI is built and deployed across the Sabio group.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Solution Assurance

• Review and assure the AI solutions we deliver to customers against EU AI Act obligations, ISO 42001 controls, customer‑specific regulatory requirements and Sabio's internal standards.
• Partner with delivery teams during discovery, design and deployment to ensure bias, hallucination, prompt‑injection, misuse and other AI‑specific risks are identified and mitigated by design – not patched in later.
• Support pre‑sales and customer conversations on compliance posture, certifications and responsible AI commitments.

Policy, Procedure & Strategy

• Draft, maintain and evolve internal AI policies, procedures, standards and control frameworks.
• Contribute to the strategic direction of Sabio's AI governance programme – including roadmap to ISO 42001 certification and ongoing alignment with EU AI Act, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.
• Translate regulatory change (EU AI Act guidance, national implementations, sector‑specific rules) into practical, actionable internal guidance.

Audit & Assurance

• Audit Sabio's AI deployment and support methodologies against internal standards and external frameworks.
• Support external audits from customers, certification bodies and regulators – preparing evidence, running walkthroughs and remediating findings.
• Build and report on AI governance KPIs that give leadership and customers a clear, honest view of compliance posture.

Responsible AI in Practice

• Operationalise responsible AI principles – fairness, transparency, accountability, robustness, human oversight – across solution lifecycles.
• Work with engineering and AI teams on practical mitigations for bias, hallucination, jailbreak resistance, data leakage and acceptable‑use boundaries.
• Help define and evolve our approach to evaluation, red‑team and ongoing monitoring of deployed AI systems.

Enablement & Communication

• Run working sessions, training and clinics that lift AI governance literacy across engineering, delivery, sales and operations.
• Bring people together across geographies and disciplines to land decisions and unblock initiatives.
• Produce high‑quality written content – policies, briefings, customer‑facing assurance materials, internal comms.

Working with AI

• Use AI tooling (Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Cowork and others) as a core part of how you deliver – drafting, analysing, summarising, reviewing – to materially amplify your output.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Required

• Demonstrable experience in AI compliance, AI governance or AI risk – either as a dedicated focus or as a major component of a broader compliance, legal, infosec, cyber or engineering role that you've since pivoted toward AI.
• Strong working knowledge of the EU AI Act and a clear understanding of how risk classification, obligations and timelines apply to real‑world AI systems.
• Familiarity with ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 Type II – what they require, how they interlock, and how to evidence compliance in practice.
• A genuine grasp of the core principles of modern AI: LLMs, prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation, and agentic frameworks – enough to challenge engineers credibly and apply governance to what's actually being built, not a generic abstraction of it.
• Hands‑on experience using AI tooling as part of your day job – using AI co‑work / copilots to draft, review, analyse and accelerate your own output.
• Awareness of bias, hallucination, prompt‑injection, data leakage and misuse risks in deployed AI systems, with practical experience helping to mitigate them.
• Excellent written and verbal communication – able to draft a board‑grade policy, run a workshop, brief a customer auditor and write a sharp internal memo.
• Ability to run meetings, bring groups together and drive outcomes across geographically dispersed teams and different business functions.
• Comfort with high‑pace, multi‑stakeholder environments – motivated, flexible, and able to build effective working relationships across cultures and time zones.
• A passion for raising the bar in others – coaching, enabling and growing AI governance literacy across the organisation.

Desirable

• Working proficiency in Spanish alongside English.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Cowork and the broader Microsoft AI ecosystem.
• Hands‑on familiarity with AI offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and conversational AI platforms such as Cognigy, and a practical sense of how their governance characteristics differ.
• Prior career stage in legal, information security, cyber security, audit or software engineering – now focused on AI governance and compliance.
• Experience supporting customer‑facing audits or regulator engagement in a B2B / enterprise context.
• Exposure to AI evaluation, red‑team or model assurance practices.
• Experience working in or with contact centre, customer experience or other regulated enterprise domains.

Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to an ISO 42001 certification journey end‑to‑end.
• Familiarity with NIST AI RMF, UK AI regulatory developments or sector‑specific AI guidance (financial services, healthcare, public sector).
• Exposure to emerging agent interoperability and safety standards (e.g. MCP, A2A) and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns.
• A track record of writing publicly – blogs, talks, whitepapers – on AI governance, responsible AI or adjacent topics.

Job Benefits

• Remote/Flexible work
• Discovery Medical Aid
• Connectivity Allowance
• 15 days paid holiday a year – including three Sabio days
• Momentum EAP

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