Director of Governance & Risk in Liverpool

This is a rare opportunity for someone who can look at a complex, fast-scaling organisation and design the governance architecture that lets it grow with confidence, without slowing it down.

Our client is operating in a heavily regulated, consumer-facing sector where trust, rigour and speed must coexist. Commercially driven and growing, it has reached the point where the structures that got it here need to evolve — not because anything is broken, but because what comes next demands a more deliberate, more durable approach to how the organisation governs itself.

Our client believes that a well-designed governance framework liberates decision-making rather than constraining it, and that genuine assurance gives leadership teams the confidence to move fast because they trust what they are standing on. The person they are looking for will share that conviction.

What you will build and lead:

• Design and embed an enterprise governance framework — structures, accountabilities, decision rights and escalation pathways that work in practice, not just on paper.
• Establish an independent assurance function that gives the board and ExCo an honest, evidence-based view of how well the organisation is actually operating.
• Develop a risk appetite framework in partnership — making risk tolerance explicit so that operational teams can make decisions with clarity.
• Commission and oversee thematic assurance reviews across the business — identifying where the gap between policy and practice is widest and working with operational leaders to close it.
• Own the design of the policy architecture: what policies are needed, how they are structured, and how they connect to the governance framework as a whole.
• Build the cultural conditions in which good governance is seen as a professional standard people are proud to meet — not a burden imposed from the centre.
• Lead board and committee governance: papers, cadence, information quality, and the disciplines that make board oversight genuinely effective.

The person our client is looking for:

This is a rare profile. Our client is not looking for a compliance expert, a legal generalist or an internal auditor in the traditional sense — though candidates may have started in one of those disciplines. They are looking for someone who has spent their career thinking about how organisations govern themselves well, and who has the practical credibility to build something from scratch in a business that moves quickly.

• Demonstrable experience designing and implementing governance frameworks in complex, multi-entity or multi-jurisdictional organisations.
• A track record of establishing or significantly maturing assurance functions — with the independence and credibility to give boards an honest picture.
• Background in a regulated, operationally complex sector — the specific sector matters less than the complexity navigated.

For a confidential conversation, please submit a current CV and a brief note on your experience designing governance frameworks — specifically what you built, and what changed as a result.