Senior Internal Controls Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Internal Controls Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to maintaining strong governance, effective risk management, financial integrity, operational discipline, and reliable internal-control environments across diverse markets and business operations. Our teams collaborate across Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Operations, Technology, Procurement, Human Resources, Internal Audit, and senior leadership to identify risks and strengthen organizational controls.

Our internal-controls function supports the design, implementation, testing, monitoring, documentation, and continuous improvement of controls across financial, operational, technology, compliance, and business processes.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Internal Controls Specialist to lead internal-control design, risk and control assessments, control testing, remediation, documentation, monitoring, reporting, and continuous-improvement initiatives.

The ideal candidate will assess whether key controls are appropriately designed and operating effectively, identify control gaps and weaknesses, coordinate remediation activities, strengthen control frameworks, and provide management with clear insight into control effectiveness and emerging risks.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve the organization's internal-control framework.
• Establish internal-control policies, standards, methodologies, procedures, and governance requirements.
• Support implementation of risk-based internal-control programs across business functions and legal entities.
• Identify and assess financial, operational, compliance, technology, and process risks.
• Perform risk and control assessments across key business processes.
• Develop and maintain risk and control matrices for relevant processes.
• Identify key controls, preventive controls, detective controls, compensating controls, and monitoring controls.
• Evaluate control design against identified business and process risks.
• Assess whether controls are appropriately designed to mitigate relevant risks.
• Perform walkthroughs with process owners to understand processes, systems, responsibilities, and control activities.
• Document business processes, workflows, risks, controls, control owners, and evidence requirements.
• Develop and maintain process narratives, flowcharts, control matrices, and supporting documentation.
• Define control objectives, control descriptions, control frequency, control owners, and evidence requirements.
• Establish appropriate control standards for manual, automated, and IT-dependent controls.
• Coordinate periodic control self-assessments with process owners.
• Develop annual and periodic control-testing plans based on risk, materiality, business complexity, and control importance.
• Execute operating-effectiveness testing for key internal controls.
• Review control evidence for completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and appropriateness.
• Perform sample selection and testing in accordance with approved methodologies.
• Identify control exceptions, deficiencies, failures, and documentation gaps.
• Evaluate the severity and potential impact of identified control weaknesses.
• Distinguish isolated exceptions from systemic or recurring control deficiencies.
• Document testing results, findings, conclusions, and supporting evidence.
• Prepare clear control-testing reports for management and relevant stakeholders.
• Track control deficiencies from identification through remediation and closure.
• Work with control owners to develop practical corrective and preventive action plans.
• Establish remediation deadlines, responsibilities, milestones, and evidence requirements.
• Monitor remediation progress and challenge overdue or insufficient corrective actions.
• Validate remediation evidence and confirm whether identified control issues have been effectively addressed.
• Perform follow-up testing where necessary to confirm sustained control effectiveness.
• Identify recurring control deficiencies and recommend broader process improvements.
• Monitor changes in business processes, systems, regulations, organizational structures, and operating models that may affect internal controls.
• Assess control implications of new products, services, systems, projects, acquisitions, restructurings, and business changes.
• Support control design for new processes and system implementations.
• Review segregation-of-duties arrangements and identify incompatible access or responsibilities.
• Coordinate with Finance and Technology teams on access controls, authorization controls, and system-based controls.
• Review user-access processes, approval workflows, privileged access, and periodic access reviews where relevant.
• Support controls over financial reporting, transaction processing, master data, and financial systems.
• Assess controls over journal entries, account reconciliations, financial close, procurement, payments, revenue, payroll, fixed assets, inventory, and other key processes.
• Evaluate controls over cash management, treasury activities, financial reporting, and balance-sheet accounts.
• Review procurement and procure-to-pay controls, including vendor onboarding, purchase approvals, invoice processing, and payment authorization.
• Review order-to-cash controls, including customer master data, billing, collections, cash application, and credit processes.
• Review inventory and asset-management controls where applicable.
• Assess controls over expense management, employee payments, travel, corporate cards, and reimbursements.
• Support compliance-control assessments covering applicable laws, regulations, policies, and contractual requirements.
• Coordinate with Compliance, Legal, Risk, and other functions on control requirements and remediation.
• Support internal and external audits by providing control documentation, testing results, evidence, and management responses.
• Coordinate with Internal Audit on control assessments, audit findings, and remediation activities.
• Review external audit and assurance findings for potential control implications.
• Monitor management action plans arising from internal audit, external audit, regulatory reviews, and other assurance activities.
• Maintain an integrated register of control deficiencies, audit findings, remediation actions, and due dates.
• Develop dashboards and reporting on control performance, deficiencies, remediation, and emerging risks.

Key Performance Indicators

• Key control coverage
• Control design effectiveness
• Control operating effectiveness
• Control testing completion rate
• Control testing timeliness
• Control exception rate
• Control deficiency rate
• Material control deficiency rate
• Repeat control deficiency rate
• Control evidence completeness
• Control evidence quality
• Risk and control matrix completion
• Process documentation completion
• Process walkthrough completion
• Control owner certification rate
• Control self-assessment completion
• Remediation completion rate
• Remediation timeliness
• Overdue remediation items
• High-risk issue resolution time
• Control deficiency recurrence rate
• Root-cause analysis completion
• Corrective-action effectiveness
• Follow-up testing completion
• Audit finding closure rate
• Audit finding remediation timeliness
• Internal audit issue resolution
• External audit issue resolution
• Regulatory issue remediation
• Segregation-of-duties compliance
• Access-control review completion
• User-access exception rate
• Financial-control compliance
• Operational-control compliance
• Policy compliance
• Control automation coverage
• Automated-control monitoring coverage
• Continuous-control-monitoring adoption
• Control testing efficiency
• Manual control effort reduction
• Data-analytics coverage
• Control dashboard accuracy
• Management reporting timeliness
• Control documentation accuracy
• Control framework compliance
• Control owner training completion
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• Process improvement completion
• Internal-control maturity improvement

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in internal controls, internal audit, risk management, financial controls, governance, compliance, or assurance, preferably within a multinational, regulated, complex, or multi-entity organization.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Proven experience designing, assessing, testing, and monitoring internal controls.
• Strong understanding of risk and control frameworks and control-assessment methodologies.
• Experience developing risk and control matrices, process narratives, flowcharts, and control documentation.
• Strong knowledge of financial and operational controls.
• Experience performing control walkthroughs and operating-effectiveness testing.
• Strong understanding of control evidence, sampling, testing procedures, and deficiency evaluation.
• Experience identifying, documenting, and remediating control deficiencies.
• Strong root-cause analysis and corrective-action capabilities.
• Experience working with Finance, Operations, IT, Procurement, HR, Compliance, Risk, and other control functions.