AJ Yawn

AJ Yawn is the author of the best-selling GRC Engineering for AWS and one of the leading voices shaping the future of governance, risk, and compliance.

With more than 15 years in cybersecurity, AJ's journey has spanned military leadership, entrepreneurship, and executive roles in some of the most trusted organizations in the world. He began his career as a U.S. Army officer, earning the rank of Captain, where precision, discipline, and accountability were the difference between success and failure. Those values have guided him ever since.

After leaving the Army, AJ launched into the cybersecurity industry, quickly recognizing the gap between the speed of modern technology and the outdated approaches of traditional compliance. Determined to close that gap, he founded and served as CEO of a venture-backed cybersecurity startup, leading teams to help organizations tackle their most pressing challenges. Later, as a Partner at a Top 20 CPA firm, he worked directly with companies navigating regulatory complexity, seeing firsthand how broken and inefficient the compliance landscape had become.

Today, AJ serves as the Director of GRC Engineering at Aquia, where he pioneers practical, scalable solutions for continuous compliance in the cloud. He's also a sought-after instructor and mentor:

→LinkedIn Learning Instructor with courses on GRC, SOC 2, and cloud compliance, completed by more than 171,000 learners worldwide.
→Associate Instructor at the SANS Institute, teaching the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
→Mentor to practitioners and leaders across the industry, helping them level up their careers and reimagine what's possible in GRC.

Through his book, courses, and global speaking, AJ is leading the GRC Engineering movement—helping organizations embed compliance directly into their technology, automate evidence, and build trust at the speed of innovation.

Because the future of governance, risk, and compliance won't be built on binders and spreadsheets. The future of GRC is engineering.