HR Director, India & Middle East

Role Overview:

This is a senior, commercially focused HR leadership role responsible for shaping and delivering the employees agenda across India and the Middle East. As a member of the India leadership team and the EMEAI HR team, the HR Director will partner closely with business leaders to translate growth, profitability and organisational priorities into practical employees strategies. The successful candidate will combine strategic judgement with a hands-on approach, using workforce insight, talent decisions and efficient HR delivery to improve business performance.

Key Accountabilities:

• Commercial HR partnership: advise senior leaders on organisation, capability, workforce, and reward decisions, constructively challenge assumptions and ensure employees investments support revenue growth, productivity, margin and long-term value. • Talent and succession: strengthen leadership pipelines, succession coverage and retention of critical talent; coach leaders and key employees, and establish clear career pathways, including for engineering and R&D populations. • Performance and reward: embed consistent performance management, use market and internal data to guide pay decisions, and oversee salary and variable-pay processes with robust cost discipline. • Organisation and change: lead workforce planning, organisational development and change initiatives that build capability, accountability, engagement, diversity and an effective employee experience. • Growth and integration: provide HR leadership for expansion and acquisitions, including employee integration, organisation design and cultural alignment. • Operational excellence and governance: ensure compliant, reliable and cost-effective payroll, benefits and personnel administration; simplify processes through technology, automation, outsourcing and self-service where appropriate. • Leadership and insight: lead and develop the regional HR team, build succession capability, manage the HR plan and budget, and use meaningful metrics to identify risk, measure impact and inform business decisions. • Matrix contribution: collaborate across Business Units and Corporate functions and make a strong contribution to the wider EMEAI employees strategy.

Candidate Profile:

• A commercially minded senior HR professional with 12–15 years’ broad HR experience, including significant leadership responsibility in a complex, international and highly matrixed organisation. • Strong business acumen and financial awareness, with evidence of linking HR priorities to growth, profitability, productivity, cost and organisational performance. • A strategic thinker who can build and execute a regional HR plan, while remaining pragmatic, hands-on, results oriented and accountable for delivery. • Credible and assertive with senior leaders, with excellent communication, negotiation, coaching, influencing and cross-cultural relationship skills. • Proven capability across talent, succession, reward, employee relations, change, compliance, HR operations and team leadership, ideally within a fast-growing engineering, technology or industrial environment. • High ethical standards and sound judgement, with the confidence to balance commercial objectives, employee considerations and legal or reputational risk. • Able and willing to use AI and digital tools responsibly to improve productivity, decision quality, work quality and cost efficiency, while critically evaluating outputs. • Graduate qualification in business, HR, engineering or a related discipline, together with an appropriate HR or business qualification, and excellent written and spoken English. • Demonstrated ability to work effectively in a highly matrixed organisation, using strong influencing and stakeholder-management skills to align diverse teams, build consensus and deliver outcomes without direct authority.