AI Compliance and Governance Specialist

ATS Client; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,100,000 - 1,700,000; Full time

Job summary

Sabio Group, based in Cape Town, seeks an AI Compliance and Governance Specialist to strengthen our Internal AI Team. You will evolve governance posture across solutions, policies, and evidence for regulators and clients.

The role requires hands-on governance, curiosity about AI, and collaboration across functions. Responsibilities cover policy development, risk management, audits, and enabling teams through training and clear guidance.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience in AI compliance or governance.
• Strong understanding of EU AI Act obligations and timelines.
• Familiarity with ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to brief auditors.

Responsibilities

• Review AI solutions for EU Act obligations and internal standards.
• Collaborate with delivery teams to mitigate AI risks by design.
• Support pre-sales and customer discussions on compliance posture.

Skills

AI compliance

AI governance

Regulatory risk

Communication

Stakeholder management

Cross-cultural

Tools

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Cowork

Job description

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