Framework implementation and maintenance, most commonly SOC 2 and ISO 27001, sometimes sector specific requirements.
Evidence collection and control monitoring, which is the unglamorous majority of the work and the part that determines whether an audit goes smoothly.
Security questionnaires from prospects and customers, which in a growing software company can consume days per deal if nobody owns them.
Vendor and third party risk assessment.
Policy authorship and the internal work of making policies something people follow rather than documents that exist.
Note what is not on that list. This is not a role that configures firewalls or investigates alerts. It works alongside those people.
Hiring & Search
Hiring a GRC and compliance analyst for a cybersecurity or software company
In short
Governance, risk and compliance work sits between security and the commercial side of the business. It is the function that gets SOC 2 and ISO 27001 done, answers enterprise security questionnaires, and manages vendor risk. The Philippine market supplies this well, with a large population experienced in audit, controls and regulated environments.
Every software company reaches the point where deals stall on a security questionnaire. The instinct is to hire another engineer. Usually the constraint is not technical capability, it is the absence of anyone who owns evidence, controls and the audit relationship.
What the role actually covers
Why it unblocks revenue
The commercial argument is simpler than the security one. Enterprise buyers cannot purchase from a vendor that fails their vendor risk process. A stalled questionnaire is a stalled deal.
A dedicated governance and compliance hire typically pays for itself by removing engineering time from questionnaire responses and by shortening the security review stage of the sales cycle. That framing also tends to get the headcount approved faster than a purely defensive one.
A dedicated governance and compliance hire typically pays for itself by removing engineering time from questionnaire responses and by shortening the security review stage of the sales cycle. That framing also tends to get the headcount approved faster than a purely defensive one.
What the Philippine market supplies
This is a genuine strength. The country has a large professional population in audit, internal controls, risk and regulated industries, and a substantial share have supported international organisations directly.
Well represented: SOC 2 and ISO 27001 implementation and maintenance, internal and external audit support, control testing, policy development, vendor risk assessment, and data privacy work including the Data Privacy Act and familiarity with GDPR obligations.
Thinner: senior governance leadership setting risk appetite at board level, and highly specialised regulatory work in narrow sectors.
Well represented: SOC 2 and ISO 27001 implementation and maintenance, internal and external audit support, control testing, policy development, vendor risk assessment, and data privacy work including the Data Privacy Act and familiarity with GDPR obligations.
Thinner: senior governance leadership setting risk appetite at board level, and highly specialised regulatory work in narrow sectors.
How to interview
Framework knowledge is easy to test and easy to fake with study. Test application instead.
Ask about a control that looked fine on paper and was not being followed. What they found, how, and what they changed. This separates people who have operated a programme from people who have documented one.
Ask how they would handle an auditor asking for evidence that does not exist. The honest answer involves scoping, remediation and a timeline, not improvisation.
Ask them to review one of your actual security questionnaire responses. You will learn immediately whether they understand the underlying control or are pattern matching language.
Ask what they would deprioritise. Governance people who treat every finding as critical are exhausting to work with and lose credibility with engineering.
Ask about a control that looked fine on paper and was not being followed. What they found, how, and what they changed. This separates people who have operated a programme from people who have documented one.
Ask how they would handle an auditor asking for evidence that does not exist. The honest answer involves scoping, remediation and a timeline, not improvisation.
Ask them to review one of your actual security questionnaire responses. You will learn immediately whether they understand the underlying control or are pattern matching language.
Ask what they would deprioritise. Governance people who treat every finding as critical are exhausting to work with and lose credibility with engineering.
Where it sits and who it reports to
The common structural error is placing this role under engineering, where compliance work is perceived as overhead and gets deprioritised every sprint.
Reporting to a chief technology officer, chief operating officer or founder directly tends to work better, because the function needs authority to ask for engineering time and needs to be visible to the commercial side of the business.
Give them access to the deal pipeline. A governance analyst who knows which enterprise deal is waiting on which control prioritises correctly without being managed.
Reporting to a chief technology officer, chief operating officer or founder directly tends to work better, because the function needs authority to ask for engineering time and needs to be visible to the commercial side of the business.
Give them access to the deal pipeline. A governance analyst who knows which enterprise deal is waiting on which control prioritises correctly without being managed.
Hiring in the Philippines?
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