AI Compliance Lead

Who we are is what we do.

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.

Among the largest globally distributed companies in the world, our team of 7,000 spans more than 100 countries, speaks 74 languages, and brings a connected and dynamic culture that drives continuous learning and innovation for our customers.

Why should you be part of our success story?

As the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) company in history, Deel is transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies – breaking down borders that have traditionally limited both hiring and career opportunities. We're not just building software; we're creating the infrastructure for the future of work, enabling a more diverse and inclusive global economy. In 2024 alone, we paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits to workers in 109 countries—ensuring people get paid and protected, no matter where they are.

Our momentum is reflected in our achievements and customer satisfaction: CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Fast 500, and repeated recognition on Y Combinator's top companies list – all while maintaining a 4.83 average rating from 15,000 reviews across G2, Trustpilot, Captera, Apple and Google.

Your experience at Deel will be a career accelerator. At the forefront of the global work revolution, you'll tackle complex challenges that impact millions of people's working lives. With our momentum—backed by a $17.3 billion valuation and $1 B in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in just over five years—you'll drive meaningful impact while building expertise that makes you a sought-after leader in the transformation of global work.

About the role

The AI Compliance Lead runs the day-to-day compliance controls over how AI is used at Deel. Deel's Legal AI Governance team monitors and interprets AI law and sets the policy requirements, including what human oversight requires. This role turns those requirements into working controls, tests whether they operate, and follows issues through to remediation.

Deel operates an AI management system (AIMS) certified to ISO/IEC 42001. You will be a hands-on operator of that system — maintaining controls and evidence against Annex A and the Statement of Applicability, supporting internal audits and management review, and preparing for surveillance audits.

The role covers AI across Deel's HR and payroll platform and its regulated payments business, where controls must also meet anti-money laundering, sanctions and payments obligations. It is technical: you will test retrieval and agent controls directly, write and run evaluation scripts, and work alongside engineers, product owners and financial crime compliance teams. You will not build the systems you test.

What you'll do

• Turn requirements into controls. Translate Legal's regulatory analysis and policy requirements into control procedures, test steps and evidence requirements. Maintain the AI control library, mapped to the obligations register that Legal owns and to ISO/IEC 42001 Annex A.

• Operate the ISO/IEC 42001 AIMS. Maintain control evidence and the Statement of Applicability against Clauses 4–10 and Annex A. Track nonconformities and corrective actions, prepare inputs for management review, and support surveillance and recertification audits, including working with the certification body's auditors.

• Support AI system impact assessments. Run and quality-check AI system impact assessments aligned with ISO/IEC 42005, with Legal owning legal conclusions. Coordinate with privacy impact assessments and with US state requirements for bias audits and notices on automated employment decisions.

• Test retrieval and RAG controls. Test ingestion, indexing and retrieval controls, including whether retrieval respects tenant and user permission boundaries and whether outputs stay grounded in approved sources.

• Test for prompt injection. Design and run test cases for direct and indirect prompt injection through retrieved documents, emails, tickets and tool outputs. Confirm detections, guardrails and escalation work as designed.

• Test agentic controls on Akai and other agent platforms. Verify least-privilege tool permissions, action logging, human approval before irreversible or high-impact actions, and kill switches. Sample agent action logs against approved permissions and report deviations.

• Govern MCP servers and connectors. Review how MCP servers, connectors and agent tools are proposed, approved and added: who can add them, how they are reviewed, and what data and actions they reach. Test that only approved connectors are in production.

• Set and check eval acceptance criteria. Work with engineering to define offline and online evaluation sets and acceptance thresholds for high-impact use cases. Use Python to re-run or independently check evaluations and to analyze monitoring data.

• Oversee model and prompt change management. Confirm that changes to models, prompts, retrieval sources and agent tools go through change control, including regression testing after upstream foundation-model provider updates, and that controls are re-tested when material changes occur.

• Run compliance testing. Plan and carry out tests under the risk-based AI testing plan. Document workpapers to audit standard, log findings in the AI issue register, follow up with first-line owners, and validate that remediation is complete.

• Review AI in regulated payments activity. Perform compliance reviews of AI used in AML, sanctions screening, fraud triage and payout operations across Deel's licensed payments subsidiaries in the US, UK, EU, Singapore, Australia and Canada. Coordinate with each entity's BSA Officer or MLRO and with Financial Crime Compliance operations.

• Support pre-deployment reviews. Review AI use cases that touch regulated activity through the existing operational risk pre-deployment process, and prepare the compliance recommendation for sign-off on high-impact use cases.

• Prepare reporting. Produce control metrics, testing results and dashboards for the AI Governance & Compliance Council, and draft the regulated-entity section of AI reporting to the Board Audit Committee.

• Support audits and examinations. Assemble control evidence for ISO/IEC 42001 audits, partner-bank due diligence, financial-regulator examinations and Internal Audit. Support Legal on AI regulator and enterprise customer inquiries when asked.

Knowledge and skills

• Control design and testing: Writes controls that can be tested, designs test steps and samples, and documents work that stands up to audit, certification and regulatory review.

• ISO/IEC 42001 in practice: Hands-on AIMS experience across Clauses 4–10 and Annex A, including the Statement of Applicability, internal audit, management review, nonconformity and corrective action, and surveillance audits. Working knowledge of ISO/IEC 42005 (AI system impact assessment) and of ISO/IEC 42006 (requirements for AIMS certification bodies), so you understand how certification auditors work and what evidence they expect.

• Technical depth: Broad, practical understanding of:

  • RAG and retrieval: ingestion, embeddings, vector stores, grounding, and tenant and permission boundaries in retrieval.

  • Indirect prompt injection through retrieved content, email and tool outputs, and the controls that mitigate it.

  • Agentic controls: least-privilege tool permissions, action logging, human approval for irreversible actions and kill switches.

  • MCP and connector governance: tool onboarding, review and data-access scope.

  • Evaluation design (offline and online), acceptance thresholds and drift monitoring.

  • Model and prompt change management, including regression testing after provider model changes.

  • Working Python for analysis and evaluation scripting, plus SQL.

• Regulatory grounding: Working knowledge of BSA/AML and sanctions obligations, plus enough familiarity with the EU AI Act, US federal and state AI laws (including state rules on automated employment decisions, bias audits and notices), NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 to apply the requirements Legal sets.

• Judgment: Separates routine exceptions from issues that need escalation, and escalates early with the facts.

• Communication: Writes clear, concise findings for technical and non-technical readers.

• Collaboration: Gets work done across Legal, Information Security, Risk and Engineering without direct authority over those teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, data science, engineering, business, finance, law or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• 5+ years in compliance monitoring and testing, technology risk, IT audit, model risk or AI assurance.

• 2+ years hands-on with AI, machine-learning or LLM-based systems, including testing or evaluating retrieval, agents or model outputs.

• Hands-on experience operating or auditing an ISO/IEC 42001 AIMS, or a closely comparable certified management system (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001) with direct AI scope.

• Working proficiency in Python for data analysis or evaluation scripting.

• Experience running compliance or audit tests, documenting workpapers and tracking remediation.

• Experience with AML, sanctions, fraud or payments compliance at a money services business, payments company, fintech or bank is a plus.

• Experience in a high-growth or pre-IPO company is a plus.

• Relevant certifications are a plus: ISO/IEC 42001 Lead Auditor or Lead Implementer, IAPP AIGP, CISA, CRISC, CAMS or CIA.

Total Rewards

Our workforce deserves fair and competitive pay that meets them where they are. With scalable benefits, rewards, and perks, our total rewards programs reflect our commitment to inclusivity and access for all.

• Our salary range reflects gross base salary. For commercial roles with commission eligibility, this figure represents On-Target Earnings (OTE), inclusive of base salary and target commission.

• Salary ranges are quoted in USD as a consistent global reference. Your offer will be localized to your country's currency using a market-aligned conversion.

• Final pay is based on objective, job-related criteria including experience, skills, and location.

• We don't ask about salary history. Offers are based on the role and what you bring to it.

Some things you'll enjoy

• Stock grant opportunities dependent on your role, employment status and location

• Additional perks and benefits based on your employment status and country

• Optional flexible working office membership, with IWG

At Deel, we're an equal-opportunity employer that values diversity and positively encourage applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of race, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy or maternity or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Unless otherwise agreed, we will communicate with job applicants using Deel-specific emails, which include @deel.com and other acquired company emails like @payspace.com and @paygroup.com. You can view the most up-to-date job listings at Deel by visiting our careers page.

Deel welcomes persons with disabilities to apply to any of our open roles. We will provide application and/or interview accommodations on request throughout the recruitment, selection and assessment process for applicants with disabilities or other needs. If you require application and/or interview accommodations, please inform our Talent Acquisition Team via email (recruiting@deel.com) and a team member will be in touch to ensure your equal participation.

As part of our hiring process, we primarily rely on interviews and role-related assessments. In limited cases, we may also consider informal background information relevant to the role, in line with our privacy and fairness obligations.

This application process may utilise Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT) and AI systems to assist in evaluating candidates based on experience level, technical skills and qualifications. This processing is conducted in compliance with applicable Data Protection, AI Governance and Labour Laws. We ensure human oversight is maintained in all final hiring decisions. Your personal data is not used to train AI models. For more information on how we process your personal data, please see our Recruitment Privacy Policy.

• For NYC Residents: In accordance with NYC Local Law 144, an independent bias audit has been conducted on AEDT