CFO

The company

A profitable, founder-led technology products business built over more than a decade, now several hundred people strong and growing quickly. It builds and deploys software products for large institutional and public-sector customers, where contracts are long, milestone-based, and won on technical credibility rather than price.

It recently closed a significant institutional round and is preparing for a public listing.

Why this role exists

The company has outgrown its finance function. Accounting, compliance and audit are in place and run well. What does not yet exist is business finance: annual operating planning, contract-level margin visibility, a model built and defended in-house, and the reporting discipline a listed company is held to.

This is not a controllership seat. It is the person who builds the finance function that takes this business public, and then runs it as a listed company.

What you will own

• Business finance. Build the AOP process from the ground up, bottom-up with business and delivery leaders, broken to quarterly and monthly targets, with a real re-forecast cycle and monthly variance reporting.
• Project-level financial operations. Revenue recognition on milestone and percentage-of-completion contracts, cost booked to project, contract-level margin and cash visible every month.
• Unit economics. Margin split across licence and implementation revenue, cost-to-serve per deployment, infrastructure and compute cost tracked against the revenue it supports.
• The model. Built and maintained in-house, mapped to order book and pipeline, with assumptions documented by business line and defensible to anyone who asks.
• Listing readiness. End to end. Restatement, related-party resolution, internal financial controls documented and tested, DRHP preparation and banker management.
• Working capital. Discipline against long public-sector payment cycles. DSO, unbilled revenue and collections tracked and improving.
• Capital structure. Debt conversations and project financing options against the order book.
• The function itself. Assess the existing team, identify the capability gaps, define the roles and hire against them.

First 90 days

A written assessment of the reporting, close and planning process. A team structure and hiring plan. Project-level tracking live across the order book. The model rebuilt in-house with assumptions agreed with the founders and the board. The AOP process and calendar defined. The first board and investor pack delivered in diligence-ready format. Auditor and banker relationships taken over, and a listing readiness plan published with milestones, owners and dates.

What we are looking for

Two mandatory requirements. Neither is negotiable.

1. You have personally owned an IPO readiness workstream through to DRHP filing, as the accountable owner rather than a contributor. If the listing was subsequently deferred or withdrawn, that is fine. The process experience is what matters.
2. You have run business finance and FP&A directly, including owning the AOP and presenting monthly variance to a board.

Also required:

• Chartered Accountant.
• 10 to 15+ years in finance, including at least one full pre-IPO to listed journey.
• Project-level financial operations experience, where revenue is recognised on milestones or percentage of completion.
• You have built accounting SOPs and internal financial controls from scratch, and defended the resulting positions to statutory auditors.
• Scale reference of roughly 500 to 2,000 people, having scaled finance through a period of rapid revenue growth.
• You have worked directly with investors, boards and bankers as a key managerial person.

Sectors we are sourcing from: technology product and software businesses with a mix of licence and implementation revenue; IT services businesses with contract-based, milestone-linked revenue; infrastructure, EPC and other project-led businesses where percentage-of-completion accounting is routine.

Who this is not for

We would rather be direct than waste your time.

• If your IPO exposure was advisory, or you were part of the team rather than the person accountable for the workstream, this is not the seat.
• If you have run finance only where the SOPs and controls were already in place, this will be uncomfortable.
• If you need a team around you before you can produce output, this will not work. You will build the model yourself and open the ledger yourself, for a while.
• If you have led finance at a large listed multinational with deep support functions and have never operated lean, the day-to-day here will surprise you.
• This role is on-site in Delhi NCR. It is not a hybrid or remote seat.

What makes this worth a conversation

The mandate is unusually wide. Business finance, project economics, listing readiness, treasury and debt, systems, and the shape of the function itself all sit with this person. You will work directly with the founders and the institutional investor, and the work you do in the first year determines what the company looks like as a listed business.

For the right person this is the seat where you stop being the number two who ran the listing and become the CFO who owns it.

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