EVP – Risk and Resilience — Enterprise-Operations Centre

The mandate

Work to redesign service chargebacks has revealed that several global operations depend on the same Chennai teams, utilities, vendors and decision-makers even though their cost reports imply diversification. Recovery plans exist by function, but their assumptions conflict: each expects priority access to the same alternate seats and specialist personnel. The board has concluded that this concentration requires independent executive ownership before a new pricing model inadvertently encourages further consolidation without pricing the risk.

The EVP – Risk and Resilience is an urgent new appointment covering an operations centre of approximately 1,700 employees and partners and an annual services perimeter near ₹2,950 crore. First-line executives remain responsible for operating their controls. This leader will set the aggregate risk view, challenge acceptance, ensure recovery capability is tested and advise how resilience costs should be attributed. The role has direct escalation access to the executive sponsor and relevant board forum.

The executive must avoid two extremes: a compliance overlay that catalogues risks without changing design, and a resilience programme that duplicates entire operations regardless of criticality. The first task is to identify which combinations of service, people, technology, facility and third party could fail together. The second is to make informed choices about prevention, recovery, transfer and explicit acceptance.

Why this seat is open

No existing risk leader has authority across all services in the centre, and the concentration emerged outside the annual succession and organisation plan. Because charging decisions are already progressing, the board has created this seat as urgent new hiring and seeks a qualified shortlist quickly. The role is additive; it is not a disguised replacement or an allocation of blame for previous design choices.

What you will own

• Build an aggregate dependency model covering essential services, key people, applications, data, facilities, vendors and geographic alternatives.
• Reclassify service criticality with business owners, testing stated impact and recovery needs against actual customer, financial and regulatory consequences.
• Establish risk appetite and acceptance routes for concentration, including expiry, remediation cost and accountable executive sign-off.
• Design severe-but-plausible exercises that test concurrent failure and decision-making, not just restoration of an isolated application.
• Ensure chargeback principles reveal resilience consumption and do not reward businesses for selecting under-protected low-cost service tiers unknowingly.
• Review material migrations, outsourcing and automation for new single points of failure before approval.
• Create an independent reporting team with access to primary incident, capacity and control evidence and a clear relationship with internal audit.
• Lead response governance for any centre-wide disruption until normal executive accountabilities can safely resume.

The first 12 months

The first 30 days will identify the most consequential shared assumptions in current continuity plans. By day 90, the EVP must present a risk-ranked concentration map, interim controls for unacceptable exposures and a schedule of joint recovery exercises. Critical services will have confirmed business owners and realistic impact tolerances rather than inherited labels.

By month nine, the organisation will have completed at least three cross-service simulations, including loss of a facility, a common technology dependency and a key third party. Findings must drive funded design decisions. New service pricing should separately identify resilience commitments and require explicit acceptance where a sponsor selects a lower recovery level.

At 12 months, all critical services should have tested recovery evidence within their approved tolerance or a time-bound board-accepted exception. Unmapped single-person dependencies should reduce by 80%, severe exercise actions should close by due date at a rate above 90%, and no high-risk concentration should remain hidden by functional reporting. Resilience expenditure must reconcile to the approved plan.

What the board will measure

• Accuracy of the aggregate exposure view and speed with which new concentrations become visible.
• Recovery demonstrated under joint exercises, including command decisions, communications and minimum viable service rather than document completion.
• Closure or explicit acceptance of every exposure above appetite, with no indefinitely renewed exceptions.
• Constructive independence: credible challenge that changes business design without assuming first-line ownership.
• Formation of a capable risk team with successors for incident command, operational resilience and third-party oversight.

The person

You are an enterprise-risk, operational-resilience or business-continuity executive who has governed concentrations across a scaled services operation. You have designed and led exercises in which multiple safeguards failed together and can show the investment or operating decisions that followed. Experience in regulated financial or business services, global capability centres, telecommunications or other always-on operations is relevant.

You bring 22–28 years of experience and have held risk authority over a perimeter of at least ₹1,700 crore involving 1,200 or more employees. You understand service costing sufficiently to expose risk subsidies, but you remain independent of commercial convenience. The board will test your willingness to escalate an attractive consolidation or outsourcing case when recoverability is unproven.

This is an onsite Chennai appointment owing to incident-command and exercise responsibilities.

Compensation and terms

The fixed package is expected at ₹2.2–3.0 crore plus performance variable. Reward will reflect tested recoverability, exposure closure, decision quality and team capability; the absence of incidents alone will not demonstrate performance. Final structure will recognise current mix and relevant scale. The urgent process will still respect contractual notice and complete diligence.

Confidentiality

The concentration profile, served businesses, suppliers and recovery arrangements are restricted security information. Only qualified candidates proceeding under a mutual undertaking will receive operational detail. The broad location and rounded perimeter are insufficient to identify the organisation and must not be combined with external research for that purpose.