Senior Trade Compliance Specialist

A typical week often involves complex compliance review, agency engagement, executive advisory, and junior team mentoring — leading FTA preferential-origin programs, working through difficult export-control or sanctions matters, supporting CBP or BIS examinations, advising senior leadership on trade-strategy questions. You're often the senior trade voice when matters require institutional judgment. Audit outcomes, duty savings, and absence of violations are the operating measures.

The harder part is often the multi-agency complexity at the senior level — trade compliance spans CBP, BIS, OFAC, FDA, USDA, and destination-country agencies, and senior specialists carry the full picture. Variance across employers is wide: at large multinationals you have specialty support; at smaller firms the senior specialist may serve as trade-compliance officer.

This role rewards people who are deeply trade-fluent, calm with regulators, and disciplined in regulatory writing. Licensed Customs Broker, CCS, CES, and senior trade credentials anchor seniority. The trade-off is the time-zone overhead and the personal exposure of named-responsible-person trade obligations.