Staff Security Governance Engineer - Policies & Standards

An overview of this role

As a Staff Security Governance Engineer, you will be the individual contributor who owns how GitLab writes, maintains, communicates, and measures its security policies and standards. You will turn emerging regulations, including AI regulation, into clear requirements that engineering, product, and legal teams can act on, and you will use automation to keep governance lightweight and continuous rather than a point-in-time exercise. You will sit on the Security Governance team within Security Assurance and work closely with Security Compliance, Security Risk, and GRC Engineering. You will report to the Director, Customer Trust & Security Governance.

What you'll do

• Policies and standards
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of GitLab's security policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines: drafting, stakeholder review, approval, publication, annual review, and retirement.
• Define and run the exception management process, including risk-based approvals, expiry tracking, and trend reporting that shows where policies need to change.
• Run policy attestation and investigate non-adherence.
• Keep policies clear, practical, and aligned with how GitLab's engineering teams work in a DevSecOps environment.
• Regulatory and framework alignment
• Monitor emerging regulations and standards (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, sector or regional requirements) and partner with Legal well ahead of compliance deadlines to assess impact and update policy.
• Maintain mappings between our policies and frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, FedRAMP, and NIST CSF, so requirements are written once and reused.
• Measurement and assurance
• Define KPIs for policy adherence and report trends to Security leadership.
• Run targeted internal assessments of adherence and drive remediation to closure.
• Support audit activities by coordinating evidence, testing, and remediation management.
• Customer trust
• Support customer questionnaires and customer meetings, and help turn recurring customer requests into better policies and self-service content.
• Automation and AI
• Identify and implement automation and AI-assisted workflows for policy management, evidence collection, control monitoring, and assessment work, in partnership with GRC Engineering.
• Technical leadership
• Act as a technical and program leader across Security, Product, Legal, and Engineering, influencing without direct authority.
• Mentor other team members and help set the direction of the Security Governance roadmap.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years in security governance, GRC, or IT risk, with hands-on ownership of a policy and standards lifecycle and measurable outcomes, ideally at a global technology company.
• Working knowledge of SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, FedRAMP, and NIST CSF, including how to put them into practice, not only how to read them
• Experience creating and maintaining an enterprise Information Security Management System (ISMS), ideally including hands on involvement in ISO 27001 certification or recertification.
• Understanding of cloud, SaaS, and DevSecOps practices, and the ability to write policy that engineers will follow.
• A risk-based mindset that balances compliance with real security risk.
• Demonstrated use of automation or AI to reduce manual GRC work.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including translating technical concepts for engineers, executives, auditors, and customers.
• Experience collaborating with Security, Product, Legal, and Engineering.
• Certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CISA, or similar are highly desirable.

What success looks like

• First 30 days: Assessed the current policy library and exception process, built relationships with key stakeholders, and proposed a prioritized roadmap.
• First 90 days: Uplift the existing security policy library to align with NIST CSF, ISO 27001/27017/27018/42001, and PCI-DSS.
• First 120 days: A refreshed review cadence is in place, exception reporting is running, and can demonstrate a measurable improvement in policy adherence.
• First six months: Develop Policy as Code and collaborate with Security, Product, Legal, and Engineering for implementation into existing workflows.

About the team

The Security Assurance organization helps GitLab build and maintain trust by strengthening how we approach security, compliance, and risk. Security Governance sits within it and owns customer trust, security awareness, policies and standards, and other governance functions. Our counterparts are Security Compliance, Security Risk, and GRC Engineering.

You will join a small team of four direct reports under the Director, where each person has broad scope and visible impact. We work remote-first and asynchronously, and we write things down and share them openly, so you'll draft and revise policies and standards in the open with input from Security, Legal, Product, and Engineering.

United States Salary Range 168000 - 238000 USD