Bridge International Academies - Director - Finance

The Job Location - Vijaywada/Andhra Pradesh

The Finance Director holds a critically important role at Bridge as the executive leading all Finance activities for a Company that is scaling at an unprecedented rate. The company launches in India at scale with the roll out of 100 schools and a 100 new schools every year after that.

In India, we will require financial leadership to build world-class financial infrastructure for a rapidly scaling multi-unit business. This includes providing leadership for robust of financial systems, policies, procedures and support team for the business taking into account current and fast growing high volume transactions, headcount, numbers of geographically distributed business units, and the operations multi-country global brand.

The Finance Director is also able to dive deep into details and think at the ground level. He/she should be able to play offense as a business and systems thinker - scalability of platform, improvements to unit economic and scaling model, global shared services - as well as defense - dealing with leakage, fraud prevention, and air-tight controls in challenging operating environments.

Key Responsibilities :

- Drive efficient financial systems and processes that span across the different function and business units - this would include everything from payroll, cash management, fee payment processes, vendor payments, transport, supply chain and retail business units which will include text books, uniforms,meals and potentially/possibly transport

- Ensure and be responsible for complying with financial regulations, and acts that govern education services company and non profits and own auditing towards the same.

- Build a culture of and drive efficient budgeting and spending with leadership,

- Be responsible for monitoring and forecasting operational expenditure for the india unit in its entirety

- Work with business units to ensure judicious operational spending from each business unit

- Drive relationships with financial partners

- Map detailed financial risk mitigating strategy for operational bleeding, potential leakages,

- Help leadership understand financial implications of decisions

- Work with Country Lead to develop a roadmap towards profitability - from each school unit to the entire India unit towards this, said person must :

- Not lose sight of the big picture and drive financial efficiency with an obsessive eye for detail

- Be comfortable working with the mentality to scrim, scrounge, and bootstrap

- Be comfortable with extremely fast paced working environments with aggressive turn around times

- Be familiar with managing financial processes and risks for extensive field based operations

- Have a start up mind set to be able to bootstrap and be highly agile to adapt for new ideas, developments and rapid scaling up

Qualifications and Educational Requirements :

- At least 15 years of experience within finance/corporate finance, including experience as Finance Director/VP Finance

- Deep experience leading and managing the financial operations and strategy for a Company with hyper growth and complex challenges across a broad scope of work

- Degree in a business/finance related field - e.g. CA or MBA (Finance) with a record of top academic performance from a top-tier elite institution

- Strong background in financial management (systems) with a thorough understanding of financial regulations

Preferred Experience and Skills :

- Experience leading Finance for fast-growth, rapidly-scaling companies strongly preferred

- Success operating in environments with high risk of fraud and leakage, particularly in emerging markets