Compliance Director

Your Impact

• Lead AppFolio’s Privacy Program, including the Enterprise Data Privacy Policy, individual rights requests, privacy risk assessments, and records retention.
• Privacy SME for the third-party risk management program (TPRM), in partnership with the TPRM program.
• Conduct a comprehensive initial maturity and operating effectiveness assessment of AppFolio's existing privacy program to identify gaps, establish baseline risk profiles, and chart a roadmap for program evolution.
• Map privacy obligations to real-world business and product workflows, cleanly integrating data privacy, classification, retention, and access standards into Product, Engineering, and operational teams without creating unnecessary friction.
• Direct AppFolio’s compliance oversight of data governance as an enterprise discipline, standing up the compliance framework, policies, and standards where they do not yet exist. Partner with Legal, InfoSec, and Business leaders to integrate data compliance and privacy standards into first-line operations. Serve as the compliance lead for privacy and data governance dimensions of AI, automated tools, and emerging technology across company products and internal operations.
• Establish a standardized framework to measure and report on compliance program health, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs) across core compliance domains.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to identify key compliance data sources and establish consistent, repeatable reporting processes.
• Synthesize compliance metrics into actionable reporting outputs, ranging from operational team updates to executive leadership and board committee decks.
• Establish clear operational thresholds and accountability, ensuring that risk trends or identified compliance gaps lead to practical action, designated ownership, and tracked resolution.
• Act as the primary Second Line liaison to Enterprise Risk Management (“ERM”) and Internal Audit, providing consistent compliance reporting inputs to support enterprise risk assessments and independent assurance.
• Serve as the accountable lead for the Privacy and Data Compliance programs and the second-line reporting framework, and coordinate the Compliance team members who support them.

Qualifications

• Operator-minded leader with a practical, outcome-focused approach to building structured, sustainable processes without bureaucratic overhead.
• Demonstrated track record as a hands-on individual contributor who thrives on executing directly while leading through persuasion, trust, and influence.
• Thriving in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment to align Legal, Product, Engineering, Data, Information Security, and Business Operations teams around shared compliance goals.
• Prioritizing urgency and transparency when tracking compliance commitments, reporting risk metrics, and managing executive cadences.
• Elevating the collective output of the department by introducing simple, standardized metrics that bring clarity to program results and operational effectiveness.
• Building trust by listening to customer needs and embedding data privacy and retention directly into business workflows.
• Consistently meeting commitments across board reporting, program milestones, and audit readiness.
• Proven capability to brief C-suite executives and board committees, translating compliance data and risk context into commercial risk decisions and actionable guidance.
• Bachelor’s degree required; relevant professional certifications (e.g., CIPP/US, CCEP) are a plus.

Must Have

• 10+ years of progressive compliance, risk, or operational leadership experience in high-growth technology, SaaS, fintech, or regulated environments.
• Demonstrated experience defining compliance metrics, KPIs/KRIs, and standardized program reporting structures from scratch in a growing organization.
• Proven, hands-on experience building and operationalizing comprehensive privacy frameworks (e.g., CCPA/CPRA) and records retention programs within SaaS product architectures and operational workflows, ideally in a business that acts as both controller and service provider/processor.
• Experience building or operating privacy or data governance programs (e.g., CCPA/CPRA, records retention, data classification, data ownership, second-line monitoring) in a technology or regulated environment.
• Proven track record as a hands-on individual contributor driving end-to-end execution of enterprise program management, governance reporting, and cross-functional tracking.
• Experience serving as a primary subject matter expert and Second Line liaison to ERM and Internal Audit functions.

Location

All late-stage candidates complete an in-person meeting with an AppFolian as part of our hiring process.

Compensation & Benefits

The compensation that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is: $167,200 to $209,000 [base pay]. The actual compensation for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, and internal equity.

Please note that compensation is just one aspect of a comprehensive Total Rewards package. The compensation range listed here does not include additional benefits or any discretionary bonuses you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.