Dual-Site GCC Stabilisation Leader

The mandate

An acquisition left the group with a European engineering centre and a rapidly scaled India GCC, both carrying platform, quality and embedded-software roles with overlapping titles but different authority. Conflicting release decisions caused a major customer delay, and the global engineering executive resigned after neither centre accepted end-to-end service ownership or a clear consolidation path.

The interim must join in Frankfurt within three weeks and lead for twelve months. A permanent distributed-engineering search begins after the board approves the target centre topology and two product families operate under it, expected in month six. The selected successor will overlap for six weeks and chair a release council, talent review and the final cross-site continuity exercise.

Handover requires every platform and product work package to have one accountable site and leader, duplicate roles to be resolved, release and incident authority to follow service ownership, critical skills to retain two-deep coverage, source and vendor dependencies to carry expiry, and the permanent leader to accept cost, talent, service and unresolved-integration registers.

The interim may stop transfers, reassign existing work, consolidate forums, set service ownership, alter temporary reporting and commit up to EUR 28 million within the approved integration. Site closure, permanent appointments, collective workforce actions, product discontinuation and decisions above EUR 6 million require board approval. The seat cannot waive product-safety or customer-release controls.

Manufacturing footprint, sales integration, enterprise ERP and legal-entity consolidation are explicitly out of scope. The mandate covers the two engineering centres, their platform and product boundaries, leadership, release and reliability governance, captive-versus-vendor work, value evidence and succession into a durable global model.

Why this seat is open

The customer delay made duplicated leadership and fragmented authority commercially visible, and the executive resignation removed the only enterprise-wide decision point. Both centres now protect scope and talent while product teams absorb the cost of ambiguity. Temporary authority is needed to choose ownership, operate it through releases and hand a proven topology to permanent leadership.

What you will own

• Map products, platforms, work packages, leaders, skills, suppliers, costs and decisions across both engineering centres.
• Assign one accountable site for each outcome while preserving deliberate redundancy for continuity and scarce expertise.
• Resolve duplicate leadership, shadow approvals, split backlogs and incompatible release forums through evidence-based choices.
• Decide captive, vendor and shared-service boundaries using intellectual property, product intimacy, scale and control needs.
• Build leadership succession and skill coverage around product ownership rather than local headcount pyramids.
• Command cross-site releases and continuity exercises that remove one centre, supplier or critical leader.
• Transfer the operating charter, work map, talent decisions, economics, exceptions and portfolio governance through successor-led forums.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive accountability for integrating or stabilising multiple global engineering centres after acquisition or rapid expansion.
• Resolved overlapping product and platform roles by assigning genuine end-to-end authority, not merely changing reporting lines.
• Balanced intentional resilience with costly duplication across locations, suppliers and scarce technical skills.
• Led cross-border workforce and leadership decisions while preserving customer release and product-safety controls.
• Exercised the target model through real releases, incidents and absence of a major site or leader.
• Completed handover to a permanent distributed-engineering executive after visible board and product decisions.

Non-negotiables

• Can start in Frankfurt within three weeks and travel monthly among Germany, Poland and India sites.
• Will accept exclusive executive responsibility and continuous escalation for global engineering releases.
• Brings post-acquisition multi-centre integration with product ownership; location strategy alone is insufficient.
• Must disclose relationships with affected employers, suppliers, GCC advisers, recruiters and labour consultants.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest Frankfurt start and the largest duplicate engineering footprint you personally resolved.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe one capability you deliberately kept in two centres and the failure risk that justified it.
3. 49 words maximum. Which exercised decision proves a site owns a product rather than a portion of its backlog?