Director of GRC

We're building the company which will de-risk the largest infrastructure build-out in history.

When people finance GPU clusters, the datacenters housing them, and the infrastructure powering them, they need "offtake" - meaning someone has signed a contract to lease the cluster for a period of time before its even built.

Financing a GPU cluster is inherently risky, since margins are thin and volumes are huge. Lenders don't want to take on the risk that cluster developers can't repay their loan, and cluster developers really don't want to risk not selling their cluster. As a result, risk is offloaded to the customer using fixed-price long-term contracts.

If you don't mitigate this customer risk, there's a bubble. This isn't SaaS anymore - application layer companies sign multi-year contracts for computer and inference, but sell to customers on monthly subscriptions. If you mess up a purchase, it's game over: a minor shift in your revenue growth rate might mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy. But what if companies could exit their contract by selling it back to the market?

Otherwise, as AI scales, compute only becomes available to folks who can effectively take on that risk. A 2-person startup in a San Francisco Victorian can't realistically sign a 5-year take or pay contract on $100m supercomputers. But they may be able to buy the month of liquidity that someone else sold back.

So that's what we make: a liquid market for GPU offtake.

About the Role

As Director of GRC, you'll own governance, risk, and compliance at SFCompute and build the team that runs it - starting with you as the first hire. We've completed our first SOC 2 audit and are pursuing ISO 27001 next. These two - maintaining SOC 2 and obtaining ISO 27001 - are the committed mandate.

Reporting to engineering leadership, you'll set the function's strategy and operating cadence, hire and manage a small GRC team, and personally build and drive the program of work from day one - designing controls, running the tooling, and managing auditors yourself until the team is in place to take it on. Much of what your team will run doesn't exist yet - the mandate is to design new functions and processes, not inherit them.

This is a build role. You should have prior startup experience in a high-impact, senior capacity, and you should have personally taken a company through an ISO 27001 certification for the first time - not just maintained one that was already in place.

About You

• Prior experience in a senior, high-impact GRC or security compliance role at a startup - you've built programs under resource constraints, not just operated within an already-mature function.

• Hands-on experience driving a company through its first ISO 27001 certification, from readiness through audit - standing up the program, not inheriting one already in place.

• Experience owning or running a SOC 2 program.

• Proven people leadership - you've hired, managed, and developed a team before.

• Comfortable working cross-functionally with engineering on controls, tooling, and technical remediation.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership: Hire, manage, and develop the GRC team from day one - set its structure, priorities, and operating cadence, and own its results.

• Compliance Program Ownership: Own our SOC 2 Type 2 program and lead ISO 27001 certification end to end - readiness, gap remediation, control implementation, auditor management, and continuous monitoring.

• Risk Management: Stand up enterprise risk management - risk assessments, the risk register, treatment plans, and reporting to leadership.

• Policy & Process Design: Author and operationalize the policies and functions a maturing company needs: access reviews, business continuity, security awareness, and vendor management. Collaborate with departments to ensure change management and incident response policies are sensible and meet compliance obligations.

• GRC Tooling: Own our compliance automation platform, Vanta, and drive selection and integration of GRC-related tooling.

• Third-Party Risk: Own vendor security reviews and third-party risk assessments.

Nice to Haves

• Hold relevant certifications such as CISA, CISM, CISSP, CRISC, or ISO 27001 Lead Implementer/Auditor.

• Have operated compliance automation platforms (Vanta or similar).

• Have privacy program experience (GDPR/CCPA).

Benefits

Generous equity grant

Team members are offered a competitive salary along with equity in the company

Visa Sponsorships

Yes, we sponsor visas and work permits

Retirement matching

We match 401(k) plans up to 4%

Medical, dental & vision

We offer competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums

Time off

We offer unlimited paid time off as well as 10+ observed holidays

Parental leave

We offer biological, adoptive, and foster parents paid time off to spend quality time with family

Daily lunch

We cover lunch daily for employees

Unlimited office book budget

You can buy as many books for the office as you want

The San Francisco Compute Company is committed to maintaining a workplace free from discrimination and harassment.

We make employment decisions based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, belief, national origin, social or ethical origin, age, physical, mental, or sensory disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, HIV status, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status including pregnancy, or any other status protected by law.

We welcome the opportunity to consider qualified applicants with prior arrest or conviction records. Our commitment to diversity includes hiring talented individuals regardless of their criminal history, in accordance with local, state, and federal laws, including San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance and California’s ban-the-box laws.