AI Compliance and Governance Specialist

AI Compliance and Governance Specialist

Department: IT

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Cape Town

Reporting To: Stephen Smith

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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• Operationalise responsible AI principles – fairness, transparency, accountability, robustness, human oversight – across solution life cycles.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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,…