Location: Dubai

Position Type: Full-time

Overview:
We are seeking an independent, audit-minded governance and assurance professional, providing the CEO Office with oversight of Real-Estate project delivery, design/development, procurement, and commercial work streams. Rather than executing project work, the successful candidate will review and assure that delivery teams are operating within approved budgets, contracts, and governance frameworks, packaging findings into decision-ready material and tracking directives through to closure.

Key Responsibilities:

Governance & Assurance Reviews

• Independently review project progress, procurement, and contract-compliance data submitted by delivery teams, validating against approved budgets, programmes, and policies rather than producing it directly.
• Conduct periodic audit-style reviews of procurement awards, payment certifications, change orders, and claims for compliance and recoverability, flagging exceptions.
• Provide MDO-level governance oversight of design and development activity, reviewing stage-gate approvals, consultant deliverables, and development milestones against approved scope, budget, and programme, as an assurance check rather than design management.
• Assure that governance controls (approval gates, documentation, sign-offs) are being followed consistently across all active work streams.

Tracking & Reporting

• Maintain a consolidated oversight tracker across all active Capital Projects work streams (progress, procurement, design/development, risk, claims), sourced from delivery teams.
• Prepare structured, exception-based weekly and monthly reports: status, risks, required decisions, and options.
• Maintain governance dashboards (e.g. Power BI) giving real-time visibility into KPIs, cost/schedule exposure, and control status.

Decision Processing & Escalation

• Triage issues surfaced by delivery teams, packaging them with analysis and recommended options.
• Maintain the risk register and escalation log, ensuring items are routed to the right decision-maker with adequate context.

Action Follow-up & Deliverable Validation

• Track all directives and action items arising from meetings and reviews to closure, maintaining a live log with owners and due dates.
• Follow up proactively with functional and delivery teams on outstanding actions, escalating non-closure.
• Validate completeness and quality of deliverables submitted by teams (reports, trackers, design packages, claims submissions) before they are considered closed, checking against defined acceptance criteria rather than re-doing the work.
• Maintain a master tracker of action items, deliverable status, and validation outcomes for Office visibility.

Requirements:

• 7–12 years in capital/infrastructure project audit, assurance, Project Controls or PMO governance, ideally including a Big 4 or similar background.
• Real estate or infrastructure sector exposure, with strong grounding in contract compliance, claims/EOT, and cost & schedule control from a review/assurance standpoint.
• Working knowledge of design and development stage-gate processes, and a track record applying or developing project governance policies (procurement, payment certification, claims, document management).
• Proficiency in Power BI, MS Project/Primavera, and advanced Excel.
• Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering, Construction Management, or related field; postgraduate qualification and PMP/PRINCE2 or equivalent advantageous but not mandatory.
• Independent and audit-minded, with strong written communication for CEO-level consumption: concise, exception-based, and decision-oriented.
• Structured and persistent in following items through to validated closure, and comfortable operating across project, design, commercial, and procurement domains without owning execution.