Director of Compliance and Client Success

Roost Affordable•Seattle, WA

6d•$125,000 - $150,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Roost Affordable is a PropTech startup building the operating system for affordable housing compliance and leasing. We automate the income qualification, certification, and compliance workflow for income-restricted programs, including LIHTC, HUD Section 8, MFTE, and other local and national programs, so the teams who run affordable housing can spend less time buried in paperwork and more time housing people. We're a lean team with an outsized mission: make affordable housing easier to operate and more accessible to the people who need it. The role We're hiring our first Director of Compliance and Client Success, the person who will own the regulatory heart of our product, the relationships with the clients who rely on it, and the team that grows around it. This is not a back-office compliance role. It's a builder's role for a compliance expert who gets genuinely excited about replacing manual workflows with scalable systems. You'll live at the intersection of deep regulatory expertise and client-facing product thinking. One hour you're partnering with our product team to refine how a certification gets generated; the next you're turning a property manager's pain point into a product requirement. You'll build the compliance function from the ground up, including the team that runs it.

Requirements

Deep, hands-on affordable housing compliance experience, with genuine command of HUD 4350.3 and LIHTC (IRC Section 42).
Mastery of income and asset calculation methodology, tenant file requirements, and recertification rules.
A compliance credential (COS, HCCP, SHCM, or equivalent), or active, demonstrable progress toward one.
Experience building, mentoring, or leading a team, with the instinct to set standards others can follow.
A service-delivery or consulting mindset; you thrive in client-facing work and make hard things feel simple.
High ownership and comfort with ambiguity; you're energized by building a function, not maintaining one.
Excellent written and verbal communication with clients, agencies, and teammates alike.

Nice To Haves

Experience with property management software (Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, or similar).
Familiarity with mixed-income multifamily compliance.
Pacific Northwest program knowledge: Seattle MFTE, King County programs, WA Commerce requirements.
Prior experience at a startup or in a high-growth, build-from-scratch environment.

Responsibilities

Be Roost's subject-matter expert, the source of truth our product and our clients are built on.
Bring genuine mastery of HUD Handbook 4350.3 and LIHTC compliance (IRC Section 42) to everything we build, from logic to edge cases.
Partner with the product team to build and refine income qualification and certification logic, and set the bar for what "audit-ready" means.
Own the rules for income and asset calculation, tenant file requirements, and recertifications so the product keeps clients compliant by default.
Represent Roost as a subject-matter expert in front of housing agencies and property owners.
Stay ahead of regulatory change across LIHTC, HUD Section 8, MFTE, and other local and national programs, and turn it into timely product and client updates.
Partner with the people who operate affordable housing, and turn their problems into product.
Own client relationships with a service-delivery mindset; be the trusted expert property managers and agencies call first.
Translate real operational pain points into clear, prioritized product requirements alongside Product and Engineering.
Onboard and support clients across diverse income-restricted portfolios, from a single MFTE building to mixed-income operators.
Meet clients where they work, in Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, or similar, so Roost fits their day rather than the other way around.
Help shape the roadmap with field insight and data on where compliance actually breaks down today.
Build the compliance team that scales this work beyond any one person.
Lead and develop Roost's compliance specialist team, setting review standards, escalation paths, and the playbooks new hires will follow.
Hire and mentor as the team grows, building the bench so compliance expertise scales with the business.
Set the culture for compliance at Roost: rigorous, service-minded, and genuinely excited about better tooling.