Divisional Finance Director — Aerospace Programme Continuity

The mandate

The divisional finance director role oversees reported margin and the cash that programmes consume across the annual review cycle. Engineering estimates, procurement commitments and customer acceptance dates can each appear reasonable while producing an indefensible combined forecast. The requirement is an accountable finance leader who can arbitrate between these inputs without assuming that commercial optimism constitutes evidence of recoverable cost.

The appointment starts on 19 October 2026 and lasts twelve months. A permanent director search will run alongside the bridge, with the incoming leader expected to participate in the final two forecast cycles. Bengaluru is the working base, with scheduled visits to programme and manufacturing teams in India; overseas reviews are primarily remote, and any travel requires advance sponsor approval rather than an open-ended global availability promise.

At handover, programme estimates must reconcile to the ledger, cash forecasts must distinguish contractual receipts from disputed milestones, and every material margin adjustment must have a traceable engineering or commercial basis. The successor should be able to reproduce the divisional performance bridge without reconstructing spreadsheets from individual memories. Completion also requires two independently reviewed closes and a signed transfer of unresolved customer, inventory and intercompany issues.

Within the approved budget, the director may set forecast assumptions, approve finance operating procedures and redirect analytical capacity. Payments above ₹50 lakh, new borrowing, permanent leadership appointments and changes to programme pricing commitments require the existing executive or board approval route. Legal entity signatories remain unchanged; the bridge does not silently inherit powers of attorney or authority to alter customer contracts.

This is not an aircraft certification role, a procurement leadership replacement or a transfer-pricing litigation engagement. It does require understanding how manufacturing variances, warranty provisions and cross-border charges influence programme economics. The director must keep finance judgements sufficiently independent to challenge operational estimates while giving programme owners a practical route to resolve the evidence gap.

What you will own

• Decide which programme estimate changes qualify for forecast inclusion, recording the evidence owner, confidence range and approval route rather than accepting every revised engineering number.
• Approve a monthly margin-to-cash bridge that separates earned revenue, billing rights, collection risk and inventory absorption at the programme level.
• Establish a disposition register for slow-moving programme inventory, distinguishing technically reusable stock from commercial demand that has not been demonstrated.
• Challenge intercompany service and manufacturing charges against documented activity, escalating policy disagreements with quantified margin consequences without rewriting group tax positions unilaterally.
• Authorize divisional close controls that connect warranty, contract loss and milestone judgements to supporting schedules, reviewer challenge and named resolution owners.
• Transfer a successor workbook containing programme assumptions, delegated authorities, unresolved disputes and a replayable forecast cycle with documented judgement boundaries and explicit ownership.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate eighteen or more years in finance with genuine divisional controller or director accountability in aerospace, defence or comparable engineered manufacturing. Provide a programme where you personally changed a margin estimate, explain the underlying engineering or commercial evidence, and show the difference between the accounting conclusion and the cash consequence. Portfolio size alone is not proof of decision ownership.
• Show working command of Ind AS alongside US GAAP or IFRS reporting interfaces, particularly contract revenue, inventory overhead absorption, warranty estimates and onerous commitments. Evidence should include a judgement paper you defended through review and how you kept divisional reporting consistent with the legal entity books without concealing legitimate framework differences.
• Bring a documented working-capital intervention involving long-cycle production or customer milestones. Explain how you distinguished delayed billing from disputed entitlement, protected operational continuity during inventory action and verified that apparent cash release did not merely move the obligation into another period.
• Prove you have led finance managers through a systems or reporting transition while maintaining close quality. Describe the control you refused to switch off, the training or parallel-run evidence you required, and the handover material a successor actually used. Availability and delegated-signing limits will be checked before an appointment is offered.

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 7 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-INT-2026-IND-41.