Business Risk, Controls & Business Continuity Lead

Function: Finance / Governance, Risk & Controls

Location: Great Britain (GB)

Reporting To: Finance Director, GB

About us

With over 200 brands sold in nearly 180 countries, we’re the world’s leading premium drinks company. Bring your passion and use your curiosity as you explore, collaborate, and innovate to build brands consumers love. Together with passionate people from all over the world, you’ll test new ideas, learn and grow, and unlock a brighter, more exciting future.

Join us to create a career worth celebrating.

To strengthen the end-to-end financial, non-financial, and operational resilience risk and controls environment across Diageo GB, ensuring key risks are clearly understood, well controlled, effectively monitored, and that the business maintains robust preparedness and response capability through a strong Business Continuity Management (BCM) framework.

The role provides leadership on controls design and management monitoring, acts as the primary GB liaison with CARE (Global Audit & Risk), builds sustainable risk, controls, and resilience capability across the business, and ensures strong linkage between the Business Integrity Lead, enterprise compliance, and continuity risk areas aligned to Diageo’s global frameworks.

· Lead the GB approach to identifying, assessing, and managing key financial, operational, compliance, and reputational risks.

·  Act as the GB subject-matter expert on internal controls and management monitoring.

·  Challenge existing ways of working and ensure controls and compliance remains a key business priority.

· Provide independent, constructive challenge to ensure risks are appropriately mitigated, owned, and monitored in line with risk appetite.

· Set the monitoring environment and effectiveness for T&E across the market

·  Lead the design, enhancement, and standardisation of management monitoring controls, with a strong emphasis on high-quality, risk-focused design.

· Define clear standards for effective monitoring, including purpose, ownership, frequency, thresholds, escalation, and evidencing.

· Ensure monitoring is explicitly linked to key risks rather than activity-based checks.

· Challenge and simplify existing monitoring, removing low-value activity and embedding insight-driven controls.

· Ensure monitoring outputs drive timely action, escalation, root cause analysis, and remediation.

· Review and assess monitoring effectiveness through structured reviews and thematic analysis.

· Coach leaders and control owners to move from “checking” to actively managing risk.

· Own and oversee controls design assessments across GB for financial and non-financial processes.

·  Ensure high standards of documentation, clarity, and evidence.

· Track remediation actions, monitor progress, and provide transparent reporting on control gaps, themes, and emerging risks.

· Act as the primary GB point of contact for CARE (Global Audit & Risk).

·  Coordinate internal audit activity, risk assessments, and assurance reviews.

· Ensure timely, high-quality responses to audit findings and recommendations.

· Translate global CARE expectations into practical, value-adding actions for the GB business.

·Lead the build of sustainable financial and non-financial risk and controls capability across GB.

· Coach control owners and leadership teams on effective controls design and management monitoring.

· Develop practical tools, guidance, and training to uplift controls maturity and confidence in the first line.

· Ensure strong connectivity between the GB Business Integrity Lead and relevant enterprise compliance risk areas.

· Support alignment of local integrity risks and controls with Diageo’s enterprise compliance framework.

· Enable clear escalation, issue management, and reporting of integrity and compliance matters.

·  Act as the GB Business Continuity Management (BCM) Lead, owning the local BCM framework and alignment to global resilience standards.

·  Lead the identification of business-critical processes, dependencies, and recovery priorities across functions and routes to market.

·  Oversee development, maintenance, and testing of Business Impact Analyses (BIAs), Business Continuity Plans (BCPs), incident response protocols, and crisis playbooks.

· Coordinate and facilitate continuity exercises, simulations, and post-incident reviews, ensuring lessons learned drive improvement and remediation.

· Ensure continuity risks, dependencies, vulnerabilities, and resilience gaps are assessed, prioritised, and tracked through to closure.

· Provide continuity and incident-readiness coaching to leadership teams and functional plan owners, strengthening first-line capability.

· Act as a key point of contact during major incidents, ensuring effective governance, escalation, communication, and recovery tracking.

· Provide clear, insightful reporting to GB leadership on risk exposure, controls effectiveness, audit outcomes, and compliance matters.

·Identify trends, systemic weaknesses, and opportunities to simplify or strengthen the controls environment.

· Drive continuous improvement using insights from CARE, compliance, and business performance.

• Significant experience in risk management, internal controls, governance, audit, or compliance within a complex commercial organisation.

• Experience across both financial and non-financial risk domains.

• Strong experience working with internal audit, second-line risk, and/or enterprise compliance functions.

• Experience in influencing senior business partners and inspire change without direct authority.

• Qualifications (desirable): ACA, ACCA, CIMA, CIA, CISA, or equivalent.

• Deep expertise in controls design and management monitoring.

• Strong analytical skills with the ability to identify root causes and systemic themes.

• Excellent business partner management and influencing capability.

• Strong coaching and capability-building skills.

• Clear, confident communicator able to translate technical risk concepts into practical actions.

• High levels of integrity, judgement, and attention to detail.

• Continuous improvement mindset and comfort operating in ambiguity.

• Ability to deal with ambiguity and needs to be a self-starter

Flexible Working Statement:

Flexibility is key to our success. Talk to us about what flexibility means to you so that you’re supported to manage your wellbeing and balance your priorities from day one.

Diversity statement:

Our purpose is to celebrate life, every day, everywhere. And creating an inclusive culture, where everyone feels valued and that they can belong, is a crucial part of this.

We embrace diversity in the broadest possible sense. This means that you’ll be welcomed and celebrated for who you are just by being you. You’ll be part of and help build and champion an inclusive culture that celebrates people of different gender, ethnicity, ability, age, sexual orientation, social class, educational backgrounds, experiences, mindsets, and more.

Our ambition is to create the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer products companies in the world. Join us and help transform our business as we take our brands to the next level and build new ones as part of shaping the next generation of celebrations for consumers around the world.

Feel inspired? Then this may be the opportunity for you. 

If you require a reasonable adjustment, please ensure that you capture this information when you submit your application.