Director of Risk

Heidrick & Struggles is the world’s foremost advisor on executive leadership, driving superior client performance through premier human capital leadership advisory services. For more than 70 years, we’ve delivered value for our clients by leveraging unrivaled expertise to help organizations discover and enable outstanding leaders and teams. Learn more at

Job Description:

Heidrick & Struggles is a premier provider of global leadership advisory and on-demand talent solutions, serving the senior-level talent and consulting needs of the world's top organizations. In our role as trusted leadership advisors, we partner with our clients to develop future-ready leaders and organizations, bringing together our services and offerings in executive search, diversity and inclusion, leadership assessment and development, organization and team acceleration, culture shaping and ondemand, independent talent solutions.

Heidrick & Struggles pioneered the profession of executive search more than 70 years ago. Additional information on the firm can be found at

The Director of Risk is a senior role within the Legal function, accountable for two core pillars of the firm's risk management approach: client/engagement risk, including public sector and government related engagements, and vendor and third-party risk. The role designs, embeds and continuously improves a risk framework that is deliberately proportionate to the size, complexity and global footprint of the firm — practical, commercially enabling and defensible, rather than bureaucratic.

The Director owns the firm's risk register, sets risk appetite and escalation thresholds with senior leadership, and acts as the firm's subject matter expert on federal contractor and public sector obligations. This is a highly collaborative, cross-functional role that partners with Security, Procurement, Finance, Client Operations, Contract Administration and the client-facing business.

Chicago, Washington or would consider remote.

Assistant General Counsel based in Sydney.

Occasional domestic travel may be required.

• Work alongside the Assistant General Counsel to own the end-to-end client/engagement risk and vetting framework, including risk criteria, tiering, vetting standards, escalation thresholds and decision rights for client acceptance and continuance.
• Act as the escalation point for heightened-risk clients, candidates and engagements — assessing sanctions, politically exposed person, adverse media, conflicts of interest, and reputational exposure — and make clear accept, decline or conditional-acceptance recommendations to Legal leadership.
• Partner with Client Operations on bid or no-bid decisions and RFP risk review.
• Establish and maintain risk-based contracting principles, escalation thresholds and approval requirements for non-standard or high-risk client terms.
• Maintain a complete and defensible audit trail of client risk decisions, and support government audits, inspector general and agency inquiries, and client-initiated compliance reviews and due diligence questionnaires.
• Monitor changes to sanctions, export control and screening regimes (OFAC, EU, UK OFSI and equivalents) and to sector-specific regulation affecting our clients, and translate these into practical updates to the vetting criteria.
• Supervise and develop the client vetting workstream and the analysts who support it, driving consistency, quality and turnaround times that meet the commercial needs of the business.

• Develop and lead the risk review of public sector engagements across US federal, state, local, education, multilateral and non-US government…