GROUP SENIOR IT INTERNAL AUDITOR

At Network Rail, we're dedicated to keeping passengers and freight moving safely and efficiently across the country. When you join us, you're not just part of a team- you're part of something that matters to millions. We believe that our people are at the heart of what we do, and every role plays a vital part in building a better, more connected railway. 

Some of our great benefits: 

Flexible/hybrid working arrangements considered.

Generous annual leave (28 days plus statutory days), with the option to buy/sell days. 

Discounts at stations with your Network Rail pass. 

Defined benefit pension scheme

75% subsidy on train tickets. 

Interest-free travel loan for train and car park season tickets. 

Volunteer leave to make a positive impact. 

Plus more....

About the role

What does the average day look like?

This role offers plenty of variety, balancing audit delivery, stakeholder engagement and data analysis. A typical day could involve leading an audit review, analysing information and evidence, meeting with stakeholders to understand risks and controls, and preparing clear audit reports and recommendations.

Strong communication and influencing skills are essential, as you'll often be discussing findings, challenging processes constructively and managing different viewpoints. You'll also review the work of other auditors, provide coaching where needed and help ensure audits are delivered to a high standard. With multiple priorities and projects running at once, good organisation and a proactive approach are key to success.

A little bit about the team... 

You'll be joining a collaborative Internal Audit team of around 16 professionals who work closely together to provide independent assurance across a wide range of business activities. The team partners with stakeholders throughout Network Rail, helping to identify risks, improve controls and support better decision-making. It's a supportive environment where knowledge sharing, professional development and high-quality audit delivery are highly valued.

Your experience and skills

Who are we looking for?

We're looking for an experienced Internal Auditor who can confidently lead complex risk-based audits from planning through to reporting and closure, while taking ownership of audit quality, delivery and timescales. You'll be skilled at building strong stakeholder relationships, leading audit engagement discussions and aligning final audit reports with business stakeholders clearly and confidently. You'll be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment, managing multiple priorities and handling challenging conversations with professionalism and tact.

The ideal candidate will hold a relevant professional qualification, such as ACA, ACCA, CIMA or IIA, and have a strong background in audit, assurance or controls. Strong analytical skills are essential, including experience working with large datasets using tools such as Excel, Power BI or similar.

Most importantly, you'll be organised, proactive and naturally curious, with the confidence to challenge constructively, think critically and influence stakeholders at all levels. Experience within infrastructure, asset management, safety-critical industries or Network Rail is beneficial, but not essential.

Essential Criteria 

Professional qualification - qualified accountant (ACA, CIMA, ACCA) or IIA or Operational experience 

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills - written and verbal, including report writing 

Ability to be a team player and to take the lead when appropriate

Good problem solving, decision making and analytical skills

Flexibility of approach, style and attitude.

Desirable

Risk management experience and Controls and assurance experience

Smiths Group

Technology Controls Manager (AI & Analytics)

Company Description

Smiths Group designs, manufactures and delivers smarter engineering solutions for mission-critical applications, solving some of the world's toughest problems for our customers, our communities and our world. For over 170 years, Smiths Group has been pioneering progress by improving the world through smarter engineering.

We serve millions of people every year, to help create a safer, more efficient and better-connected world, across four major global markets: Energy, General Industry, Security & Defence, and Aerospace. Listed on the London Stock Exchange, Smiths employs 14,600 colleagues in over 50+ countries.

This pioneering spirit continues to drive us today, underpinned by our powerful culture. Improving our world is what we do, how we think, and how we will continue to use our passion for technology and engineering to tackle our customers biggest challenges today and in the future. We're looking for people with curious minds. Who want responsibility and relish a challenge. Whether you're an experienced professional or just starting out, our global scale and focus on growth means we have some great career opportunities for you. There's never been a better time to join Smiths.

Visit us at - www.smiths.com

Job Description

Strengthening the Smiths Group internal control environment is a priority for management and the Board. The Group Internal Controls team was established to address key finance control priorities and controls over the IT environment which include both general IT and segregation of duties controls.

Collectively, this has driven a group-wide internal controls transformation and enhancement programme to support the business meet requirements in readiness for UK Corporate Reform (“UK SOX”). The scope of the programme includes implementing and embedding a standardised financial and IT control framework, enabling this through a group-wide technology platform, executing the annual Internal Controls testing plan, and driving remediation in a pragmatic way identifying opportunities to standardise and automate processes to enable enhanced standards to be achieved efficiently and sustainability.

This is a high-profile role within the business. The ideal candidate is comfortable in operating in an environment where there isn’t a pre-existing “playbook”, putting their experience into practice to closely work with the Smiths business to achieve practical, pragmatic and sustainable improvements in internal controls. The role holder will work closely with the IT function (BIS), divisional and site IT teams, and external stakeholders (e.g., consultants and external auditors) in advancing the organisation’s use of AI & Analytics tools to meet control requirements and implement all the tools, techniques, and resources to ensure these are met sustainably. The ideal candidate for this position will have prior experience of delivering AI & Analytics solutions in the internal audit and internal control fields for a large corporation or as a consultant with a top-tier practice firm. In addition, they will have experience designing and implementing General IT and automated controls leveraging technology, standardisation, and continuous improvement. You will master excellent AI and data analytics skills, hold a qualification with CISA/CISM or similar and preferably be a qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA) with experience with external audit. If you have experience with internal control programmes within a SOX environment that will be highly desirable.

Responsibilities AI & Analytics

• Identify and implement AI & Analytics opportunities to strengthen controls, leverage technologies to help the business achieve compliance efficiently, and improve the speed and quality of monitoring and reporting by the Internal Controls team. This will include:
  • Developing and deploying analytics scripts and solutions (e.g., Python and ACL) to automate reviews (e.g., flagging exceptions and facilitating resolution), also leveraging continuous control monitoring capabilities of the Diligent platform, and further customise Diligent robotics to evolving needs (handover from Diligent developers will be provided).
  • Identifying, designing, and implementing AI solutions to educate and train the business on regulatory and internal policy requirements, and streamline reviews by analysing large, complex datasets against predefined expectations.
• Identify and implement opportunities for standardising and automating templates used for control performance to facilitate the use of AI to review control information contained in standard templates.
• Designing and implementing dashboards to effectively visualise control information. The ideal candidate will have excellent data visualisation experience, enabling them to effectively collate data to convey key messages to different stakeholders within the organisation. This will include:
  • Utilising the Diligent Activity Center to create dashboards and workflows within our internal controls software.
  • Working with the Data Service team to improve the quality of existing dashboards used for internal controls reporting and support evolving reporting requirements (e.g., overview of internal control effectiveness based on latest assurance activity to support the internal controls declaration as per UK Corporate Reform).
  • Integrating assurance data from Internal Audit and Internal Controls to provide a total assurance overview to Senior Management and the Board.
• Manage the relationship with internal and external stakeholders supporting the AI & Analytics efforts.

General IT Controls

• Collaborate and communicate effectively with a wide network of stakeholders both internal (across the divisions and Group functions) and external audit to ensure effective two-way flow of information. This will include identifying opportunities to streamline the GITC external audit and incorporate AI & Analytics aspects of the external audit into our ways of working, with a view to extend good practice to financial audit.
• Drive control design and implementation for general IT controls with the goal of automating through AI & Analytics. This will include conducting compliance review to verify that established procedures are consistently adhered to.
• Drive changes to processes, systems, and practices through engagement with the leveraged BIS origination and business resources.

IT Automated controls

• Drive control design and implementation for IT automated controls.
• Review standardization and consistency of IT automated controls across entities utilizing the same ERPs and across divisions to identify any automation opportunities.
• Perform testing over IT automated controls.
• Develop remediation actions to address IT automated control weaknesses and deficiencies identified as both internal and external assurance activities.

You should note that your title and job description are not exhaustive, and the Company may require you from time to time to undertake other reasonable tasks within your capacity.

Qualifications

Education Requirements

Undergraduate degree (Required)

Professional qualification (CISA/CISM or similar) (Required) ACA/ACCA (Desirable) Degree (2:1)

Experience

• Extensive knowledge of AI & Analytics tools and their application in the internal audit and internal control fields.
• Experience of GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) technologies, with a preference for prior experience with Diligent One Platform.
• Knowledge and/or experience with General IT and automated controls, and IT frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, etc.
• Knowledge of financial systems, including ERP applications (e.g., SAP, QAD, Syteline, and Epicor).
• Previous internal or external audit experience desired (ideally with one of the Big 4).
• Fluent written and spoken English.
• Highly organised, keen attention to detail.
• Effective communicator across all levels within a business.
• Able to deal with ambiguity and complexity.
• Ability to deal with multiple competing deadlines and projects.
• Ability to understand existing processes / ways of working and the curiosity to challenge and improve them.
• Ability to influence and partner with senior stakeholders to agree and drive the implementation of AI & Analytics solutions across the business.
• Self-motivated, enthusiastic, energetic with excellent collaboration and influencing skills in order to be able to demonstrate personal credibility to the business.

Technical Knowledge and Skills Data analysis, data analytics, and AI General IT and automated controls

Internal Controls over Financial Reporting (ICFR) IT audit

Versed in best practice internal control standards and methodologies

Compass Group

Compass Group is a FTSE 20 and Fortune Global 500 business — the world’s leading contract catering, hospitality and support services provider. We operate in over 20 countries, across more than 50,000 client locations, serving over 5.5 billion meals a year. Food is our passion. Increasingly, data and AI are how we protect it, sharpen it and stay ahead.

The opportunity

We’re reinventing how Internal Audit works — moving from sampling and hindsight to data-led, continuous, forward-looking assurance. This is a rare chance to help build that capability from the ground up, not just run it. You’ll sit in a small, high-profile Group team with a direct line of sight to the very top of a FTSE 20, and the autonomy to make a real mark.

What you’ll do

• Help shape and deliver Internal Audit’s AI and data strategy — and bring it to life.
• Build machine learning and AI models that turn full data populations into sharper, earlier risk insight.
• Hunt out fraud, error and control gaps with anomaly detection — across 100% of the data, not just samples.
• Stand up the pipelines, dashboards and tooling that power continuous auditing across the whole audit lifecycle.
• Bring auditors on the journey — coaching, training and raising data literacy across the team.
• Help us assure how the business itself uses AI — model risk, fairness, transparency and governance.
• Be our voice on what ‘good’ looks like, benchmarking against the best in the industry.

What you’ll bring

• A quantitative mind and a track record of shipping analytics, ML or AI solutions in the real world.
• Fluency in Python or R and SQL, and BI tools such as Power BI.
• Hands-on machine learning, statistical modelling and AI — plus the judgement to use them responsibly.
• Comfort with modern cloud and data platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP or Snowflake) and building data pipelines.
• The rare knack of explaining the technical simply — and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Curiosity about risk, processes and controls (internal audit experience welcome, but not essential).
• A data, analytics or audit certification (e.g. CISA, CIA) is a bonus, not a must.

Why join us

• Build a capability, don’t just maintain one — genuine scope to innovate.
• Small, high-profile team with visibility at the most senior levels of a global business.
• The backing, data and autonomy to do work that actually changes how we operate.
• Hybrid working and the flexibility to balance time in the office and at home.
• Career pathways across Internal Audit and the wider global business.