Job Title: Health System Specialist (Research Compliance) Agency: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Location: [Various federal VA facilities] — on-site Remote: No — must be in-person Schedule: Full-time, permanent Salary: (Not specified; federal GS scale applies) Requirements:
Experience with regulatory compliance in clinical research
Understanding of human subject protections, informed consent, and auditing processes
Ability to coordinate protocol approvals, perform audits, and support research teams in regulatory adherence
Job Description:
You’d serve as a subject-matter expert in clinical research compliance at a VA facility—ensuring that human studies meet regulatory standards. Your duties would include tracking approval statuses, conducting audits, assessing informed consent protocols, and advising research staff on maintaining safe and compliant operations.
I’d consider it if it’s GS-12/13 with decent locality; VA benefits (FERS pension, TSP match) are hard to beat, but you’ll trade some salary and deal with a lot of IRB/R&D bureaucracy and in-person audits, so the on-site part makes sense. If you’re coming from pharma, expect a pay cut but more stability — what grade/step and which facility are we talking about?
I did this at a VAMC for two years — biggest quality-of-life factor was whether the site is AAHRPP-accredited and how mature their VAIRRS/IRBNet processes are; ask how many active studies per compliance staff and expected consent audit load. If you’ve got CIP or SOCRA/ACRP, bring it up early — it helped me land GS-12 with a higher step.
If you interview, ask to see their last AAHRPP correspondence and basic ops metrics - IRB turnaround time, number of active protocols per compliance FTE, and count of open CAPAs. I walked away from one VAMC after seeing 90+ day continuing review backlogs and one auditor responsible for about 300 studies.