Internal Audit - Lead (Remote in So. Cal.)

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!

The Opportunity

Join our top-notch risk and assurance team within a global, fast-growing and progressive data analytics and cutting-edge AI oriented software company. If you’re eager to feel empowered and apply your creativity and experience in a way that adds value and serves to mitigate business risks across the enterprise, this is the opportunity for you. This is a hands-on lead role. You will own the IT audit coverage for a defined portfolio of FICO’s financial applications, cloud platforms and security tooling — running engagements end to end, setting the testing approach, and raising the bar on how we use data, automation and AI to get assurance.

What You’ll Contribute

• Lead IT audit engagements end to end with limited supervision — scoping and risk assessment, walkthroughs, design and operating effectiveness testing, issue development, and remediation validation.
• Own the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 (SOX 404) IT general controls program for an assigned portfolio of in-scope financial applications and supporting infrastructure, spanning access to programs and data, change management, program development, and IT operations.
• Test IT application controls, key reports, interfaces and system-generated data supporting financial reporting across our ERP and other in-scope financial applications.
• Perform annual and ad-hoc segregation of duties (SoD) analysis. This is data-driven work: extracting role and entitlement data from source systems, normalizing and deduplicating it, applying and maintaining a conflict ruleset, identifying conflicting access combinations and privileged access exceptions, and working with process owners to validate, justify or remediate what surfaces. A standing goal for this role is to automate the extraction, normalization and comparison steps so the analysis becomes a repeatable, monitorable process rather than a once-a-year manual exercise.
• Audit identity and access management across the enterprise — directory services, enterprise single sign-on, identity governance and access certification platforms, and privileged access and secrets management tooling (password vaults and safes) — covering joiner/mover/leaver provisioning, privileged access, and periodic user access reviews.
• Evaluate change and release management controls across modern DevOps toolchains — Git-based source control, CI/CD pipelines, and IT service management platforms such as Jira and ServiceNow — including automated approvals and separation of duties between development and production.
• Assess controls over cloud infrastructure and enterprise data platforms, covering configuration, encryption, logging and monitoring, and data pipeline integrity.
• Perform cybersecurity and cloud security assessments across FICO’s SaaS product environments that hold sensitive client data.
• Support third-party risk and service organization report reviews — evaluating SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports, transcribing and mapping complementary user entity controls (CUECs) to FICO controls, and assessing subservice organization coverage and bridge letters.
• Contribute to emerging-risk coverage as FICO’s use of AI expands, including AI and model governance controls evaluated against frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001.
• Apply data analytics and AI-assisted tooling to audit work — scripted population extraction, full-population testing where practical, and automated continuous monitoring — rather than defaulting to manual sampling.
• Prepare clear, well-supported work papers; summarize findings and review them with the Chief Audit Executive and/or the Senior Manager, IT Risk & Assurance.
• Act as the liaison between our external auditors and internal stakeholders across a wide variety of topics and projects. This means coordinating IT scoping and walkthroughs, owning evidence and PBC requests end to end, supporting reliance discussions on internal audit work, translating external auditor expectations into practical asks for system and process owners, and tracking open items through to closure so neither side is left waiting.
• Partner with IT, Engineering, Security, Finance and business process owners so that population and sample requests are identified, communicated and retrieved efficiently.
• Drive improvement of FICO’s internal control structure through practical control design and process enhancement recommendations.
• Coach and review the work of junior auditors and co-sourced resources, and help maintain testing standards, templates and documentation quality across the team.
• Proactively keep leadership informed of progress, control weaknesses and audit findings; meet established deadlines while maintaining confidentiality when dealing with sensitive information and situations.

What We’re Seeking

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, information systems, computer science, accounting or a related field; equivalent practical experience will be considered.
• Approximately 3–5 years of progressive IT audit experience — public accounting, a national firm, or corporate internal audit at a technology, SaaS or financial services company. At least 3 years is recommended, including meaningful exposure to owning or leading ITGC and SOX 404 testing rather than executing someone else’s test steps.
• Hands-on experience testing IT general and application controls over a major ERP — Oracle strongly preferred, SAP, NetSuite or comparable also valued — and over cloud-hosted business applications such as HCM, CRM, revenue and data warehouse platforms.
• Real enthusiasm for using AI and automation to change how audit work gets done. Our team uses Claude daily and is actively building AI-assisted workflows: drafting and rolling forward testing narratives, mapping SOC report CUECs to our control set, cleaning and normalizing large access extracts, sizing and documenting samples, summarizing evidence, and replacing recurring manual procedures with scripts and continuous monitoring. You do not need to arrive an expert — but you should be the kind of auditor whose first instinct is to ask whether a task can be automated or monitored rather than repeated by hand every year.
• Working knowledge of identity governance and privileged access concepts — directory services, single sign-on, access certification, and privileged credential management — and the ability to evaluate access evidence critically rather than accept a system-generated report at face value.
• Cloud audit experience in AWS (Azure or GCP also relevant), covering IAM, logging, network segmentation, key management and configuration baselines.
• Familiarity with the control frameworks and regulatory standards we operate against: COSO 2013, COBIT, NIST CSF and SP 800-53, ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 1 and SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA and US state privacy law including the CCPA/CPRA.
• Data and scripting ability. Advanced Excel, including Power Query, is expected. Beyond that we are deliberately looking to add technical depth to the team — SQL and Python are the most immediately useful, and PowerShell, VBA, Power BI or Tableau, shell scripting, regular expressions, and working with REST APIs are all genuinely valuable here. Real depth in two or three of these counts for far more than passing familiarity with all of them.
• CISA achieved or actively being pursued. CISSP, CIA, CRISC, CPA, ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Auditor or an AWS certification are a plus.
• Experience with GRC and audit management platforms (AuditBoard, ServiceNow IRM, Workiva or similar) preferred.
• Pro-active and independent thinking in analyzing and developing solutions to complex problems.
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to explain a technical control failure to a non-technical finance or business audience and hold the line on a finding constructively.
• Comfortable working across global teams and time zones in a fast-moving public company environment.

Our Offer to You

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values: Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.
• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.
• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.
• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.
• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $80,500 to $126,500 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.

#LI-CG1

Why Make a Move to FICO?

At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics.  You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:

•    Credit Scoring — FICO® Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.

•    Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.

•    Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

Global trends toward digital transformation have created tremendous demand for FICO’s solutions, placing us among the world’s top 100 software companies by revenue. We help many of the world’s largest banks, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers and other firms reach a new level of success. Our success is dependent on really talented people – just like you – who thrive on the collaboration and innovation that’s nurtured by a diverse and inclusive environment. We’ll provide the support you need, while ensuring you have the freedom to develop your skills and grow your career.  Join FICO and help change the way business thinks!

Learn more about how you can fulfil your potential at www.fico.com/Careers

FICO promotes a culture of inclusion and seeks to attract a diverse set of candidates for each job opportunity. We are an equal employment opportunity employer and we’re proud to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all candidates without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Research has shown that women and candidates from underrepresented communities may not apply for an opportunity if they don’t meet all stated qualifications. While our qualifications are clearly related to role success, each candidate’s profile is unique and strengths in certain skill and/or experience areas can be equally effective. If you believe you have many, but not necessarily all, of the stated qualifications we encourage you to apply.

Information submitted with your application is subject to the FICO Privacy policy at https://www.fico.com/en/privacy-policy