Finance Director — Metals Capital Projects and Investment Gates

The mandate

A metals-processing business is establishing a finance-director role dedicated to its expansion and modernisation portfolio. Several projects share utility infrastructure, contractor resources and commissioning windows, yet their investment cases were approved independently. The board now needs financial challenge across the whole programme rather than budget monitoring on each construction package. Employment is open-ended. The first twenty-four months will create disciplined release gates and a reliable bridge from construction spending to usable capacity, followed by continuing stewardship of capital productivity and subsequent investment choices.

Your work starts with the assumptions that connect engineering scope to financial returns: yield, energy consumption, maintenance downtime, product qualification and customer absorption of new output. Project schedules are important, but a commissioned asset is not necessarily an economically productive asset. You will establish which readiness tests justify the next funding tranche and which changes require reapproval of the investment thesis. Cost-to-complete forecasts must include interface work and delayed-ramp cash needs rather than merely extrapolate contractor invoices against original quantities.

The director leads eighteen finance and plant-control colleagues and holds financial concurrence for capital releases within an approved delegation. Engineering remains accountable for design safety and technical sign-off. The capital committee decides major scope changes, new project commitments and material overruns; you provide the options and consequences, not an unsupported veto dressed as financial prudence. Procurement owns supplier selection, while finance challenges payment protection, escalation clauses and the economic implications of accepting equipment before its dependencies are ready.

By the second investment cycle, projects should share an explicit view of common infrastructure exposure, contingency ownership and commissioning cash. Post-investment reviews will compare actual product contribution with the original decision case and feed lessons into later approvals. Pune is the home office, with fortnightly construction-site visits that make physical progress and commercial certification visible together. The continuing role includes developing project-finance leaders capable of resisting optimistic completion narratives while staying constructive with engineers who face genuinely uncertain technical conditions.

What you will own

• Establish a portfolio cost-to-complete model that includes shared utilities, interface packages and delayed-ramp working capital, allocating uncertainty transparently instead of hiding it within each project's contingency.
• Decide the financial evidence required at investment release gates, linking additional spending to technical readiness, customer qualification and updated economics while preserving engineering's ownership of safety certification.
• Challenge equipment-payment proposals against contractual protection and dependency readiness, placing the cost of early acceptance or delayed commissioning before the capital committee with practical alternatives.
• Build commissioning cash scenarios that distinguish installed capacity, qualified output and saleable production, testing the period in which the business funds assets without receiving the forecast contribution.
• Recommend scope-change decisions using incremental return, stranded-cost exposure and funding capacity, showing when a narrower project delivers better economics than defending the original investment narrative.
• Lead post-investment reviews with plant and commercial teams, tracing return shortfalls to their actual assumptions and incorporating documented learning into the next generation of approval cases.

Candidate qualifications

• Have eighteen to twenty-two years of finance experience with meaningful responsibility in metals, energy or capital-intensive industrial projects. Provide a case where you personally changed a capital-release or scope decision after interrogating commissioning assumptions. Your account should distinguish what the engineering team certified, what finance tested and what the board ultimately authorised in response to the evidence.
• Demonstrate strong project and business-finance methods, including cost-to-complete forecasting, capitalisation judgement and sensitivity analysis rooted in operating drivers. Professional finance training is expected. You must recognise the difference between invoice progress, physical installation and productive readiness, and explain how shared infrastructure or delayed customer qualification can alter returns even when a project's direct construction budget remains intact.
• Evidence practical leadership with engineers, procurement and plant managers under delivery pressure. Show how you challenged an optimistic schedule or payment proposal without claiming technical authority you did not possess. The required judgement includes understanding contract protections, contingency ownership and the circumstances in which a financially unattractive option may still be necessary to meet safety or legal obligations.
• Have built and supervised project-finance or plant-control teams that produce defensible forecasts rather than repeat project-manager assurances. Describe how you validated data at site level, preserved decision records through scope changes and conducted a post-investment review that led to a real change in later approvals. Regular industrial-site travel and calm communication during overruns are integral to the appointment.

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 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-008.