How to Build a GRC Team: Roles, Skills, and Hiring Order

You didn't start your company to hire a compliance team. You started it to build something. But somewhere between your fifth vendor security questionnaire and your first enterprise prospect asking for a SOC 2 report, a thought creeps in: "Do we need a GRC person?"

The answer is almost always yes. The real question is when, who, and in what order.

🚨 Signs You Need Your First GRC Hire

Most companies don't plan for GRC — they get pushed into it. Here are the signs that push has arrived:

Customer questionnaires are piling up. Your CTO is spending three hours per questionnaire, and four came in this month. That's twelve hours of executive time on paperwork instead of product.
An audit is on the horizon. A customer, investor, or partner wants a SOC 2 report, ISO 27001 certificate, or HIPAA attestation. Someone needs to own the prep and keep the program running after.
Regulatory pressure is growing. You've expanded into healthcare, financial services, or government — sectors where HIPAA, PCI DSS, or FedRAMP aren't optional.
You're losing deals over trust. Your sales team keeps hearing "we love the product, but we need to see your security posture." Revenue problem, compliance disguise.
Risk is managed by vibes. Nobody owns the risk register. Incident response is "figure it out when something breaks." You've outgrown founder-handles-everything mode.

If three or more resonate, it's time. For a deeper look at building a full program around these signals, check out our complete GRC guide for growing companies.

🧑‍💼 The First Hire Profile

Your first GRC hire defines the DNA of your compliance culture. Get it right and they'll build a program that scales. Get it wrong and you're rebuilding in 18 months.

The T-Shaped Generalist

You don't need a specialist. You need a generalist with depth — broad enough to handle governance, risk, and compliance simultaneously, but deep in at least one area.

Must-have skills:

Framework knowledge — At least two frameworks deep (SOC 2 + one other is the sweet spot). They can explain framework overlap without a spreadsheet.
Evidence and audit management — At least one full audit cycle end-to-end. They know what auditors ask for and how to manage the chaos.
Risk assessment — Can build a risk register, facilitate risk conversations with leadership, and translate technical risks into business language.
Policy writing — Clear, concise policies people actually read. Not 50-page legal documents.
Communication — The most underrated skill. They need to influence without authority and get buy-in from engineering teams with twelve other priorities.

Nice-to-haves: Technical background (scripting, cloud infrastructure), GRC platform experience, vendor risk management, privacy regulation knowledge (GDPR, CCPA).

Where to find them

Look for 3-7 years of experience. Below three, they haven't seen enough audit cycles. Above seven, they may be too specialized or expensive for a first hire.

Good backgrounds: Compliance analysts at SaaS companies, IT auditors going in-house, security analysts who've moved into GRC, Big 4 consultants wanting industry roles.

Expect to pay: $90K-$130K for analysts (3-5 years), $120K-$170K for managers (5-7 years), $150K-$200K+ for senior/lead roles.

📈 Scaling from 1 to 5: The Hiring Order

Hire 1: GRC Generalist

They build your first framework, run your first audit, create core policies, and establish risk management. For 6-12 months, this person is your GRC program.

Hire 2: Compliance Analyst

When: Your GRC lead spends more than 50% of their time on operational tasks. Evidence collection eats a full week every month. Questionnaires are piling up again.

Profile: Detail-oriented, organized, 1-3 years experience. Handles evidence collection, control monitoring, questionnaire responses, and audit coordination. Excellent entry-level GRC role.

Hire 3: Security Engineer (GRC-focused)

When: Technical control implementation consistently lags behind compliance timelines. Your GRC team writes tickets for engineering that sit in the backlog for months.

Profile: Cloud security experience (AWS, GCP, Azure), scripting ability, infrastructure-as-code familiarity. Lives at the intersection of security engineering and compliance operations — implementing controls, automating evidence collection, configuring monitoring.

Hire 4: Risk Analyst

When: Vendor risk reviews are backed up. Your risk register hasn't been updated in two quarters. The board asks harder questions about risk exposure and your answers are vague.

Profile: Analytical mindset, risk framework experience (NIST, ISO 31000, FAIR), vendor management background, strong executive communication skills.

Hire 5: GRC Manager / Team Lead

When: You have 3-4 individual contributors and coordination is the bottleneck. Promote your original generalist or bring in an experienced manager for strategy and people management.

Not every company follows this exact sequence. Heavily regulated industry? Risk analyst earlier. Complex tech stack? Security engineer as hire two. Adapt the order to your biggest pain point.

🤝 Outsourcing vs. In-House

Not every capability needs a full-time hire. But outsourcing can also become a trap.

When outsourcing makes sense

Fractional CISOs / vCISOs. Strategic security leadership at $5K-$15K/month vs. $250K-$400K fully loaded for full-time. They set strategy, present to the board, and guide your team without the overhead. Especially valuable before your team is built out.
Penetration testing. Specialized skill set, cyclical need, clear deliverable. Perfect outsource.
Audit prep support. If your first audit is approaching fast, a consultant who's guided dozens of companies through SOC 2 can buy you time while you hire internally.
Managed compliance. Ongoing evidence maintenance and control monitoring works well for very small companies (under 30 people) that can't justify a full-time hire yet. For more on doing more with less, see our guide on building resilient security programs with shrinking resources.

When outsourcing becomes a trap

When institutional knowledge walks out the door. If the consultant leaves and your program goes with them, you have a dependency, not a program.
When it costs more than hiring. A vCISO at $12K/month plus a compliance consultant at $8K/month plus audit prep... at $25K+/month, you could hire two full-time people with budget left over.
When you need culture, not deliverables. Consultants can build policy libraries. They can't make your engineering team care about security. Culture comes from inside.

The hybrid model works best for most growing companies: core team in-house (strategy, daily operations, risk management, relationships), specialized capabilities outsourced (pentesting, fractional leadership, audit surge capacity).

🤖 How Tooling Reduces Headcount

Here's a truth most GRC vendors won't say out loud: the right tooling can delay or eliminate hires entirely.

Every manual process is an implicit headcount requirement. Evidence collection at 40 hours per month? Half-FTE. Questionnaire responses at 15 hours each, 10 per quarter? Nearly a full-time job. Automation changes the math.

What to automate first

Evidence collection — Automated pulls from cloud providers, identity platforms, and dev tools. Saves 20-30 hours/month alone.
Questionnaire responses — AI-drafted answers based on existing policies and prior responses. 60-80% faster.
Control monitoring — Continuous checks instead of point-in-time manual reviews. Catch drift before auditors do.
Policy management — Automated review reminders, version control, acknowledgment tracking.
Reporting — Auto-generated dashboards instead of half-day slide-building sessions.

Impact on your hiring plan

With strong automation: your first hire can accomplish what normally requires two people. You can delay hire #2 by 6-12 months. Your security engineer focuses on high-value work instead of custom integrations. Your risk analyst manages a larger vendor portfolio.

This is what episki is built for — not to replace your GRC team, but to make a small team punch way above its weight. A team of two on episki can do what a team of four does on spreadsheets. For a detailed comparison, check out episki vs. Vanta and episki vs. Drata.

📝 Job Descriptions and Interview Tips

Writing the JD — Do: State which frameworks the role covers, describe your program's current state, list team size, include salary range, mention your tooling stack.

Don't: Require CISSP + CISA + CRISC + CISM for a $110K role. List "10+ years experience" for an analyst position. Say "must wear many hats" without explaining the hats.

Interview questions that work

"Walk me through the last audit you managed end-to-end." — Separates real experience from resume padding.
"A critical control has been failing for three months and audit starts in six weeks. What do you do?" — Tests judgment under pressure.
"How would you convince a skeptical engineering team to participate in quarterly access reviews?" — Tests influence skills.
"Describe a risk you recommended accepting." — Tests risk maturity and executive communication.

🚫 Common Hiring Mistakes

Hiring too senior too early. A VP of Compliance at a 50-person company with no existing program? They'll be frustrated by the lack of infrastructure. Start with a doer, not a strategist.

Hiring too junior without support. A fresh Big 4 analyst has great fundamentals but has never built a program. Pair them with a fractional CISO or consultant.

Optimizing for certifications over capability. Someone with a CISSP who's never managed an audit is less useful than someone with no certs who's run three SOC 2 cycles. Ask what they've done, not what they've passed.

Waiting until the audit is six weeks away. GRC hiring takes 2-4 months. If audit is in Q3, start hiring in Q1. Panic hiring leads to bad fits and overpaying.

Ignoring culture fit. GRC people work cross-functionally with everyone — engineering, HR, legal, sales, leadership. If they can't build relationships across the org, technical skills won't matter.

✅ Key Takeaways

Hire when the pain is real — questionnaires stacking up, audit incoming, deals stalling
First hire = T-shaped generalist who can build from scratch across governance, risk, and compliance
Scale in order of pain — compliance analyst, security engineer, risk analyst, then manager
Outsource strategically — fractional CISOs and pentesting yes; strategy and culture, keep in-house
Invest in tooling early — the right platform delays hires and lets a small team outperform a large one
Don't panic-hire — plan 2-4 months ahead and optimize for capability over credentials

Building a GRC team pays for itself many times over — in deals closed, risks managed, audit cycles shortened, and leadership confidence earned. Start intentional, scale methodically, and never stop improving.

Ready to give your GRC team an unfair advantage? episki helps lean teams manage frameworks, evidence, and compliance workflows in one workspace — so a team of two can operate like a team of five. Start building today.