Senior Access Certification Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior Access Certification Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through disciplined contract management, operational excellence, risk management, and collaborative project delivery. Our distributed teams work across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to maintain effective governance, protect sensitive information, and support secure business operations.

We recognize that effective access governance is essential to protecting enterprise systems, project information, financial records, intellectual property, and confidential business data. Through structured access reviews, clear accountability, and risk-based control assessments, we aim to ensure that users maintain appropriate access to the systems and information required for their responsibilities.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Access Certification Specialist to lead and coordinate user access certification, access recertification, identity governance, entitlement reviews, and access control validation across the organization's enterprise technology environment.

The successful candidate will oversee periodic and event-driven access reviews, validate user entitlements against job responsibilities, coordinate certification campaigns with business and technical stakeholders, and ensure that inappropriate, excessive, dormant, or unauthorized access is identified and remediated promptly.

This role will collaborate closely with Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cybersecurity, Information Technology, Human Resources, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Compliance, Internal Audit, system owners, application administrators, and business managers. The specialist will help strengthen access governance, improve certification processes, maintain audit-ready evidence, and support compliance with applicable United Arab Emirates requirements and organizational security policies.

Key Responsibilities1. Access Certification and Recertification

• Lead the planning, coordination, execution, and completion of periodic user access certification campaigns across enterprise systems and applications.
• Establish certification schedules, review cycles, deadlines, scope, ownership, and completion criteria in accordance with organizational policies.
• Coordinate quarterly, semiannual, annual, and risk-based access reviews according to system criticality and business requirements.
• Conduct event-driven access certifications following organizational restructuring, employee transfers, role changes, acquisitions, system migrations, or significant security incidents.
• Ensure that access reviews cover employees, contractors, consultants, temporary personnel, third-party users, privileged accounts, service accounts, and other applicable identities.
• Validate user access against current job responsibilities, approved business requirements, assigned roles, and established access policies.
• Confirm that application permissions, system entitlements, group memberships, and role assignments remain appropriate and necessary.
• Identify inappropriate access combinations, excessive permissions, unauthorized privileges, and access that no longer supports legitimate business needs.
• Ensure that certification activities are completed by authorized reviewers with sufficient knowledge of the users, systems, and business processes involved.
• Monitor review progress and follow up with reviewers to ensure that certification campaigns are completed within defined deadlines.
• Escalate overdue certifications, unresolved access concerns, and repeated review failures to the appropriate management and governance teams.

2. Reviewer Coordination and Business Engagement

• Identify and validate appropriate access reviewers, including line managers, application owners, system owners, data owners, and designated control owners.
• Ensure that reviewers understand their responsibilities for evaluating, approving, rejecting, or escalating access assignments.
• Provide clear instructions, review guidance, decision criteria, and supporting information to facilitate accurate certification decisions.
• Coordinate with business departments to validate access requirements against organizational structures, job functions, project assignments, and operational responsibilities.
• Work with department heads and business managers to resolve unclear ownership, conflicting review decisions, and disputed access requirements.
• Assist reviewers in understanding complex entitlement descriptions, technical roles, inherited permissions, and nested group memberships.
• Challenge unsupported access approvals and request additional business justification where necessary.
• Promote accountability by ensuring that certification decisions are made by appropriate and authorized personnel.
• Provide guidance to managers and system owners on least-privilege principles, segregation of duties, and risk-based access review practices.
• Maintain effective communication with stakeholders throughout certification planning, execution, remediation, and closure.

3. Identity and Entitlement Analysis

• Review user identities, assigned roles, access groups, application permissions, and system entitlements to determine whether access remains appropriate.
• Analyze access assignments across enterprise applications, directory services, databases, servers, cloud platforms, collaboration tools, business systems, and project management environments.
• Validate access against approved role-based access control (RBAC) models and established authorization matrices.
• Identify discrepancies between HR records, identity repositories, access management platforms, and application-level permissions.
• Detect orphaned accounts, dormant identities, duplicate accounts, stale entitlements, and access associated with departed personnel.
• Identify users with excessive permissions, incompatible roles, unnecessary administrative rights, or access beyond their current responsibilities.
• Review direct, inherited, nested, and indirect permissions where the underlying systems provide sufficient visibility.
• Evaluate access to sensitive business applications, financial systems, procurement platforms, engineering repositories, project documentation, and confidential corporate records.
• Assess access to critical infrastructure and systems supporting construction operations, supply chains, commercial activities, and project delivery.
• Verify that external contractors, consultants, suppliers, and other third parties retain access only for approved purposes and authorized periods.
• Document material access risks and recommend appropriate corrective actions based on risk, business impact, and organizational policy.

4. Access Governance and Policy Compliance

• Support the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of access certification policies, procedures, standards, and operating guidelines.
• Maintain consistent certification requirements across applications, business units, infrastructure platforms, and geographic locations.
• Ensure that access reviews align with identity governance, least-privilege, need-to-know, and segregation-of-duties principles.
• Validate that access certification procedures reflect approved authorization models and applicable internal control requirements.
• Support the establishment of access review ownership and accountability for critical systems and sensitive information.
• Maintain clear criteria for approving, rejecting, revoking, or escalating access entitlements.
• Review policy exceptions and ensure that deviations are appropriately justified, authorized, documented, and subject to review.
• Assist with mapping certification controls to organizational security policies, internal control frameworks, contractual obligations, and relevant regulatory expectations.
• Monitor changes in access governance requirements and recommend updates to internal procedures where necessary.
• Collaborate with IAM and Cybersecurity teams to strengthen the overall identity governance and administration (IGA) framework.
• Support the integration of access certification activities with joiner, mover, and leaver processes and broader access lifecycle management.

5. Access Remediation and Exception Management

• Coordinate the remediation of access entitlements rejected or identified as inappropriate during certification campaigns.
• Track revocation requests, role adjustments, permission changes, account suspensions, and other corrective actions through completion.
• Work with IAM administrators, application owners, infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders to implement approved access changes.
• Verify that rejected entitlements are removed or adjusted within established service-level agreements and risk-based timelines.
• Prioritize remediation involving privileged access, sensitive data, financial systems, critical infrastructure, and high-risk applications.
• Maintain a centralized record of access review findings, remediation owners, due dates, outstanding actions, and closure evidence.
• Investigate delays in access removal and escalate unresolved issues to responsible managers and control owners.
• Ensure that business-critical access retained after a rejection or review concern is supported by documented justification and authorized exception approval.
• Monitor temporary access exceptions and confirm that they expire or are reassessed within approved timeframes.
• Perform follow-up validation to confirm that access changes have been implemented accurately and effectively.
• Identify recurring remediation issues and recommend improvements to prevent repeated certification failures.