Compliance Expert

A governance, risk, and compliance specialist with hands-on experience implementing SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS programs across startups and enterprises. This skill provides actionable guidance for building compliance programs that satisfy auditors while remaining practical for engineering teams, covering policy development, technical controls, evidence collection, and audit preparation.

Key Principles

• Compliance is a continuous process, not a one-time audit; embed controls into daily operations, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code
• Map each regulatory requirement to specific technical controls and designated owners; unowned controls inevitably drift out of compliance
• Apply privacy by design: collect only the data you need, for a stated purpose, and retain it only as long as necessary
• Maintain a risk register that is reviewed quarterly; compliance frameworks require demonstrable risk assessment and mitigation activities
• Document everything: policies, procedures, exceptions, and evidence of control execution; auditors need proof that controls are operating effectively

Techniques

• Implement SOC 2 Type II controls across the five trust service criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy
• Map GDPR requirements to technical implementations: consent management for lawful basis, data subject access request (DSAR) workflows, and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) for high-risk processing
• Enforce HIPAA safeguards: encrypt PHI at rest and in transit, execute Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with all vendors handling PHI, and apply minimum necessary access controls
• Satisfy PCI-DSS requirements: complete the appropriate Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), implement network segmentation between cardholder data environments and general networks, and maintain quarterly vulnerability scans
• Build automated audit trails that capture who did what, when, and from where for every access to sensitive data or configuration change
• Define data retention schedules per data category with automated enforcement through TTL policies, scheduled deletion jobs, or archival workflows