Chief Risk Officer — Process-Manufacturing Network

The mandate

The network operates at high utilisation with complex interdependencies between maintenance schedules, operating instructions, alarm protocols, quality assurance and manual interventions across multiple sites. The Chief Risk Officer must establish visibility of operating conditions, ensure risk assessment reflects cumulative exposure, and integrate recovery planning into production commitments.

Approximately 1,375 employees and material partners fall within the risk perimeter through enterprise risk, process-safety assurance, asset-integrity oversight, resilience, investigations and third-party risk. Plant managers own safe operation and maintenance owns equipment. The CRO provides independent appetite, challenge and assurance and reports directly to the relevant board committee.

Productivity and safety are not opposites, but unsafe instability is not productivity. Reliable plants control equipment condition, variation and work. The risk leader must help distinguish risk-reducing reliability actions from controls that merely restrict output, and challenge capital or schedule choices whose downside is concealed.

Temporary conditions need rigorous aggregation. A plant may be within individual limits while combinations of impaired safeguards, staffing and utility vulnerability create unacceptable exposure. The CRO will establish cumulative risk and expiry authority and require executive acceptance when restoration dates move.

Resilience includes raw material, utilities, laboratory release, critical maintenance and customer obligations. Recovery priorities should reflect safety and societal consequence, not revenue alone.

Contractor exposure is central to asset integrity. Turnarounds and specialist maintenance concentrate unfamiliar people, simultaneous work and temporary configurations. The CRO will require competence, permit, supervision, fatigue and handback assurance proportionate to risk, and will sample work in the field. Lowest bid or injury-frequency history alone cannot establish contractor readiness.

Emergency planning must cover communities and responders outside the site. Changed inventories, degraded safeguards or new processes may alter credible scenarios and protective actions. The risk leader will ensure off-site communication and mutual aid reflect current reality, run joint exercises and close findings before relying on the plan as a mitigating control.

Insurance should follow exposure but cannot substitute for restoration. Machinery breakdown, pollution, cyber and business interruption terms may exclude known conditions or require evidence that current systems cannot provide. The CRO will identify gaps, improve claims readiness and bring uninsured downside into board decisions.

Why this seat is open

The incumbent CRO resigned unexpectedly during an external review and is available only for limited handover. Interim risk oversight protects critical decisions but cannot sustain plant assurance and board reporting. This urgent replacement will join with full independent access and enhanced fit-and-proper diligence.

What you will own

• Establish a network view of degraded operation, temporary controls, deferred maintenance and cumulative risk.
• Set process-safety, asset-integrity, resilience and operational-risk appetite with the board.
• Independently test high-risk restoration, management-of-change and productivity plans.
• Govern alarm, bypass, override and temporary operating instruction expiry.
• Lead serious-event investigation and sustained-effectiveness validation.
• Test utilities, laboratory, supplier and customer continuity under realistic scenarios.
• Integrate contractor and turnaround risk into plant assurance.
• Develop plant and enterprise risk leaders without absorbing line accountability.

The first 12 months

In 90 days, review degraded conditions at priority plants, sample maintenance deferrals and temporary controls and revisit recent recurring events. Identify cumulative exposure and place interim limits where necessary. Present the board with restoration priorities, capital dependencies and risk acceptance requiring explicit decision.

By month six, close the highest-risk conditions by physical evidence, implement expiry and aggregation governance and run resilience exercises involving utilities and laboratory release. Align productivity recovery with asset and process reliability and improve contractor assurance for critical work.

At twelve months, reduce overdue high-risk maintenance and temporary conditions by 70%, close 90% of major investigation actions by due date and eliminate repeat critical safeguard failures across two assurance cycles. Priority plants should demonstrate recovery against agreed objectives, with no serious event attributable to a known unaccepted degraded condition and all appetite exceptions transparently reported.

What the board will measure

• Degraded operation and cumulative risk visible before output and capital decisions.
• Physical restoration rather than repeated administrative extension.
• Process safety, asset integrity and reliability improving together.
• Serious-event learning sustained after action closure.
• Resilience tested across utilities, laboratories, suppliers and customers.
• Independent risk leadership with credible plant relationships.

The person

You have 22–28 years in process safety, operational risk, asset integrity or manufacturing leadership across chemicals, materials, food, metals or pharmaceuticals. You have challenged production during degraded operation and can explain how restoration improved both risk and productivity.

Your remit should include more than ₹3,000 crore of assets or operations and at least 950 employees and partners. You can show a temporary condition you escalated, a maintenance deferral you reversed and a resilience test that changed investment. Direct board committee reporting and plant credibility are required.

This onsite Hyderabad role requires extensive plant travel and reports to the Group Chief Executive and relevant board committee.

Compensation and terms

The fixed range is ₹2.2–3.0 crore plus performance variable linked to risk reduction, restoration, resilience, investigation quality and leadership. This permanent onsite Hyderabad role reports to the Group Chief Executive and relevant board committee and requires plant travel. Notice up to six months may be considered with robust interim assurance.

Confidentiality

The group, plants, degraded conditions, reviews and customers remain confidential. Detailed information follows suitability, safety and conflict checks and signed confidentiality. Facts and scale are intentionally composite; applicants must not contact regulators, plant personnel or suppliers to identify the network.