Director, SOC Audits

Do you want a career without limits? Do you want to shape your own future and be surrounded by people who listen? If so, we have the perfect opportunity for you at Smith Howard.

Smith Howard is a family of companies that provides a variety of accounting and attest services to clients across a wide breadth of industries. Leading cloud infrastructure providers, SaaS providers, and enterprises turn to Smith Howard for help solving their toughest cybersecurity problems. Through the combination of extensive cloud expertise, technology, and innovative and holistic approaches, Smith Howard empowers clients to achieve their business objectives, use security and compliance to their advantage, and fuel their continued success.

Our Accounting Advisory team is looking for a seasoned leader to provide sound expertise to our existing SOC clients, act as a leader and technical resource for our SOC team, and help build our SOC practice. If you are ready to make a career move and join a firm consistently named an “AJC Top Work Place” and a “Best of the Best Firms” (Inside Public Accounting), we invite you to complete our employment application.

SummaryA Director of SOC Audits at Smith Howard will enhance our clients’ security posture, working with a wide range of clients to ensure that business and customer data is protected. This role will evaluate the design and effectiveness of technology controls throughout the business cycle and will identify performance improvement opportunities. As a leadership member of the team, this role will also be responsible for improving engagement methodology or processes and overseeing and reviewing the work of junior members of the team.

The Director will lead and work as part of a team assessing the security and compliance of client firms against regulatory and industry requirements and standards, and against security best practice frameworks. This role facilitates Security Control Assessments and other advanced-level monitoring activities, often within cloud-based environments. To succeed, this person will need a strong understanding of technical and non-technical security related system controls and an understanding of the various testing methods utilized to ascertain the effectiveness of those controls.

The Director manages a team of consultants, handles client escalations, and leads engagements. This role will have an expert understanding of framework(s) requirements, perform audit/assessments, and develop reports for clients. They will also provide quality control and peer review to other members of the delivery staff.

Essential Functions

• Drives the aggressive growth of a book of business through new clients, renewals, cross sell/upsell by managing a dedicated team and collaborating in a matrixed environment
• Interfaces with clients through entire engagement, interacting will all levels of client organizations. Establish and maintain positive, collaborative relationships with clients and stakeholders
• Responsible for the managed revenue and team utilization
• Lead project status meetings to include information for: schedules, data requirements, assignments
• Manages escalations of client engagements, ensuring delivery of quality products and services
• Maintains quality service by establishing and enforcing organization standards. Resolves and intervenes on client/staff escalations
• Manage team via talent decisions regarding performance management, compensation and hiring. Provide mentorship and coaching to team members in areas of audit, assessment, technical review, and writing
• Continuous professional development in maintaining industry specific certifications. Maintains strong depth of knowledge in the practice area
• Manage projects and team to achieve gross profit and revenue targets
• Provides scoping and pre-sales support during sales process
• Identifies practice sell-through opportunities and partners with sales
• Establishes strong relationships with named account base to grow accounts through renewal support and account planning
• Manages a team of 2-3

Position Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to structure and lead meetings and projects successfully
• Strong technical understanding of SOC 2 framework and audit requirements
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate succinctly, effectively, and instill confidence with internal stakeholders and external customers
• Proven history with business development for growing service lines and building a team to help execute new growth strategies
• Exceptional Consulting skills: ability to advise and challenge the status quo while building strong relationships
• Ability to build high-trust relationships, rapport and credibility quickly
• Strong personal initiative to appropriately manage time, and manage time of others, to meet deadlines
• Ability to shift focus frequently while maintaining excellent quality
• Skill and will to train and mentor junior staff
• Strong technical research skills
• Bachelor’s Degree and 7-12 years of experience in SOC Audits, IT Risk Advisory, Compliance Services, Internal Audit, or a related field
• CPA license a plus

Preferred Qualifications/Certifications

• AWS Solution Architect or other CSP certification
• At least one information security certification, such as CISSP, CISA, or CIA (or willing to obtain one of these certifications)
• Expertise in additional security frameworks and regulatory requirements (such as ISO, NIST, COBIT, HIPAA/HITECH, HITRUST or PCI).
• Experience working with technologies hosted via cloud computing environments (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform