Onshore EPC Divisional Chief Financial Officer — Bid Commitment Economics

The mandate

An onshore energy EPC division is expanding its tender portfolio and needs a CFO who owns the financial decision before a contract is committed. A headline bid margin can appear satisfactory while supplier payment terms, retention, delayed customer advances or an aggressive construction sequence make the project expensive to fund. The appointment is open-ended. Its first twenty-four months will establish bid-finance concurrence and portfolio commitment discipline, followed by continuing responsibility as new tenders and awarded projects enter the business.

The seat must turn assumptions into a clear funded proposition. Engineering and construction owners provide quantities, sequencing and technical contingencies; procurement supplies supported supplier terms; commercial and legal leaders define the proposed contractual allocation of risk. Finance tests whether the resulting price, payment schedule and downside leave an acceptable return after the cash consequences. Expected variation orders or later renegotiation cannot be used casually to repair an uneconomic base bid. The CFO should expose the assumption and its owner before commitment, not discover after award that a forecast depended on an unapproved concession.

Twenty-nine professionals report through bid finance, business partnering, planning and financial-control leads. You grant or withhold financial concurrence within approved bid policy, require downside revisions and approve ordinary divisional finance actions within limits. The chief executive decides commercial pursuit within delegated authority; group finance and the board reserve exceptions, major guarantees, borrowing and commitments above approval thresholds. Technical feasibility and legal enforceability remain with qualified owners. The remit does not confer the right to promise construction delivery, negotiate outside approved commercial limits or accept a material contractual risk solely to preserve a financial target.

The opening agenda should establish a commitment record that preserves the approved base price, cash terms, quantified uncertainties and exception decisions. Mumbai is the hybrid base with purposeful project and tender-review travel. After award, finance must compare approved assumptions with emerging facts so the division learns which bid risks were genuinely priced and which were shifted silently into delivery. The ongoing CFO institution should make deliberate risk-taking possible: leaders can approve a funded proposition or an explicit exception, rather than inherit an attractive margin whose cash and downside conditions were never agreed.

What you will own

• Establish financial concurrence before bid submission through a documented price, payment and downside proposition, identifying the approved assumptions and exceptions rather than endorsing the tender's headline margin alone.
• Decide whether proposed cash terms support the bid return within policy, testing advance timing, supplier outflows, retention and certification delays before the division commits to the customer proposition.
• Challenge engineering and procurement inputs through their authorised evidence, requiring ownership of quantities, sequence and supplier assumptions without presenting finance's scenario as technical feasibility or a purchasing commitment.
• Set downside review for productivity slippage, input escalation and delayed entitlement using supported sensitivities, separating priced base risks from proposed reliance on future variation or renegotiation.
• Build a portfolio commitment view across concurrent tenders and approved awards, exposing combined funding demand and exceptional terms that each individual bid paper might otherwise appear to absorb comfortably.
• Develop bid-finance and business-partnering leaders who can explain an assumption's financial consequence and approval route, avoiding dependence on the CFO to reconstruct every tender's economics personally.
• Review awarded-project experience against the approved bid record, identifying which assumptions changed and feeding evidenced lessons into future financial concurrence without retroactively rewriting the original commitment decision.

Candidate qualifications

• Evidence senior finance responsibility for onshore oil and gas EPC, energy construction or comparable long-duration project commitments. Describe a bid whose apparent margin changed after you examined funding terms or downside assumptions. Identify the engineering, procurement and commercial inputs, your personal financial judgement and the approval that followed. The example must establish pre-commitment influence, not only explanation of a loss after the project was awarded.
• Explain how your professional finance or accounting competence informs the connection between contract price, P&L and funding exposure. A 28+ year career with VP or equivalent business-finance scope must include personally exercised concurrence, rigorous planning and leadership of specialists. Describe the evidence and exception route behind a difficult tender judgement, preserving the chief executive's pursuit decision and board approval while making finance's conclusion sufficiently precise to act on.
• Explain how you treated uncertain variation recovery, retention, price escalation or supplier payment exposure in a tender decision. Show where you required evidence, priced a downside or escalated an explicit exception. A credible candidate understands that contract wording and technical delivery assumptions require their own authorised owners, and does not use anticipated renegotiation or an unapproved claim to make the initial finance proposition appear viable.
• Demonstrate a maintained commitment record and a post-award learning review that changed subsequent finance practice. You should challenge commercially urgent proposals without confusing firmness with obstruction, protect sensitive tender information and develop deputies capable of independent assumption review. Mumbai-based hybrid leadership and selected site travel are required, with evidence that financial concurrence became an ongoing institution rather than an exceptional intervention by one senior executive.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 8 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-169.