This role as Manager Legal, Risk & Compliance at GiveDirectly focuses on protecting and enabling the organization's mission to send money directly to the world's poorest. The Manager will be crucial in strengthening and formalizing GiveDirectly’s enterprise risk and controls framework, integrating risk management into all legal and compliance systems, and supporting ongoing Legal, Risk, and Compliance operations globally.
Responsibilities (What you’ll do):
Strengthen and formalize GiveDirectly’s enterprise risk and controls framework
- Build on prior Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) efforts to create a consistent, ERM organization-wide framework, refining existing tools and approaches into a cohesive system.
- Develop and maintain an organizational risk register that consolidates risks across functions, assigns clear owners, and tracks mitigation progress.
- Create and document a controls library in collaboration with Internal Audit (IA), Legal, Compliance, Finance, and Operations – mapping key controls to risks and owners.
- Coordinate quarterly risk review cycles with leadership, surfacing key trends, mitigation updates, and emerging priorities.
- Partner with Internal Audit to align on control documentation, audit planning, and remediation tracking.
Integrate risk management into GiveDirectly’s legal and compliance systems
- Embed risk thinking into policy lifecycle management, compliance training, and contract governance.
- Work closely with the Director and Associate Legal Counsel to ensure the ERM framework reflects relevant regulatory and contractual obligations.
- Collaborate with Compliance to ensure ethical, anti-fraud, and privacy-related risks are effectively managed and tracked.
- Contribute to the development and rollout of compliance reporting tools and templates for staff and leadership.
Support ongoing Legal, Risk, and Compliance operations
- Maintain the risk register and control documentation as living tools – updating quarterly and integrating with departmental workflows.
- Prepare risk and compliance summaries for senior leadership.
- Provide project-based support to Legal and Compliance teams on initiatives such as policy rollouts, contracting, governance documentation, and vendor compliance.
- Promote a culture of learning and accountability – helping teams view risk management as an enabler of effective, ethical delivery rather than a compliance burden.
Strengthen governance and cross-functional alignment
- Serve as a point of coordination between Legal & Compliance, Internal Audit, and Operations on governance and control matters.
- Facilitate consistent communication on risk themes and findings across teams.
- Contribute to the ongoing evolution of Legal & Compliance systems that underpin organizational accountability, transparency, and recipient trust.
Qualifications and Attributes (What you’ll bring):
GiveDirectly seeks candidates who demonstrate exceptional alignment with its Values and core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
Key Attributes:
- Systems-thinking and pragmatism: Ability to design structures that bring clarity and consistency without adding unnecessary complexity – building systems people will actually use.
- Experience in risk, compliance, or legal operations: Worked in environments where managing organizational risk and accountability mattered – ideally with exposure to enterprise risk, internal controls, legal compliance, or governance systems.
- Understanding of controls and assurance concepts: You know how risks link to controls, and how controls connect to organizational processes. Ability to design and document them effectively.
- Cross-functional collaboration skills: Comfortable working with legal counsel, finance, operations, and internal audit – translating complex governance ideas into shared, actionable plans.
- Clear and concise communication: Ability to synthesize inputs from across the organization into structured risk summaries and governance reports for leadership.
- Judgment and discretion: Handle sensitive organizational and legal information with care, and know when to escalate or seek guidance.
- Follow-through and accountability: Turn frameworks into action – ensuring ideas become systems, and systems are maintained over time.
Formal Requirements:
- Education: Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree in Law, Public Policy, Business, or related field (JD, MPA, MBA, or equivalent) strongly preferred. Equivalent professional experience in legal, compliance, or risk governance will also be considered.
- Experience: 3–5 years of relevant work experience in risk management, internal controls, audit, compliance, or governance functions.
- Experience working in nonprofit, donor-funded, or international organizations strongly preferred.
- Strong project management, stakeholder engagement, and documentation skills.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, early-stage, or cross-functional environments.
- Experience with insurance tracking, internal audits, or policy control environments is a plus.
- Language requirement: English (required).
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