Director of Compliance

WordPress VIP (WPVIP), the enterprise division of Automattic, is the world’s leading content management platform. Leveraging our FedRAMP certification, WPVIP is expanding its reach into the public sector, and growing momentum in highly regulated use cases. WordPress, the Open Source CMS, powers 40% of the web, and our large and growing ecosystem of technologies, services, and integrations is designed to bring that freedom and power to our customers, which include several federal government agencies, as well as Meta, The New York Times, Salesforce, and hundreds more.

Our government sector business is rapidly expanding as we capitalize on the US Federal Government’s “Cloud Smart” mandate, and we are correspondingly increasing our investment in our GRC capabilities. Consequently, we’re looking for an experienced leader to guide our investments, and to make an impact by establishing an enterprise-grade, world-class Compliance function.

With deep expertise with the FedRAMP certification process as well as Compliance more generally, you will drive toward attaining compliance standards including FedRAMP, ISO27K, SOC, and CSA Star; contribute to evolving our approach to GRC; and help our business capture a healthy share of the government sector total addressable market. This will entail being familiar with compliance standards such as NIST 800-53, and also being able to guide the organization on implementation approaches that balance security and compliance requirements with business and cultural realities. Your approach will be practical and include a willingness to roll up your sleeves and support implementation in various ways, including project-managing critical efforts.

Responsibilities: 

• Ensure attainment of FedRAMP Moderate ATO and lead and execute ongoing processes such as ConMon, Annual Assessments, and SCR (Significant Change Request) activities.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define a quarterly roadmap for the Compliance function to help address two key areas: (1) output activities to ensure certifications (such as FedRAMP) and customer commitments are assured and (2) foundational activities to improve Compliance related operations with measurable impact.
• Develop and maintain documentation for all Compliance-related activities.
• Work across product, engineering, systems, and legal teams to identify and manage privacy, data protection risks, and compliance requirements to help meet business needs.
• Select and implement appropriate systems and reporting protocols to support multiple sets of certifications, documentation requirements, control families on one side, and to support provision of appropriate documentation to auditors, sponsoring agencies, customers, etc. on the other side.
• Engage and consult with executive and senior leaders to align Compliance and Security programs with business goals.
• Participate in customer stakeholder calls to understand new customer requirements and to guide these interactions to help balance commitments to ability to deliver.
• Build, scale, and manage our compliance team to support our needs as an enterprise-focused, distributed company.
• Promote a culture of compliance throughout the organization.
• Triage and manage all compliance-related priorities including support for RFPs.

Requirements:

• Domain expertise in public sector related compliance, possessing deep understanding of federal regulations and frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST, and FISMA.
• Deep experience with FedRAMP processes for AR, OR, and SCR; and when to leverage each.
• Experience in successfully obtaining and/or maintaining FedRAMP Moderate (or higher) certifications for IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS solutions or experience working at an accredited 3PAO and having structured and performed assessments for multiple CSPs within the past three years.
• One or more relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISA, or CRISC.
• Experience working with sales teams to respond to RFPs, VSQs, and other questionnaires from prospects and customers.
• Experience leading and motivating cross-functional, interdisciplinary teams and scaling compliance-related operations.
• Experience engaging with Compliance and Info Security teams at Enterprise customers to understand requirements and to co-develop solutions.
• Experience with Cloud computing and containerization tools (eg. Kubernetes).
• Understanding of international, federal, state, and local laws concerning data acquisition, protection, and transmission.
• Must be a resident of the contiguous United States.

Extra Credit:

• Direct experience with FedRAMP High within the past 3 years.
• Proven and effective relationships within the FedRAMP PMO.
• Hands-on experience implementing compliance automation tools such as Drata, Vanta, HyperProof, etc.

Salary range: $190,000-$260,000 USD – Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

Read more about our compensation philosophy and benefits.