Director - Corporate Real Estate Governance (India & APAC)

About the role

As a Director - Corporate Real Estate Governance, you will drive measurable impact by leading enterprise-wide governance, compliance, and risk oversight across Cognizant's Corporate Real Estate portfolio in India and APAC. Your role will help ensure standardized governance, strong financial control, regulatory compliance, and effective risk management across CRE programs, capital projects, vendors, and transformations across the region.

In this role, you will:

· Establish and maintain the Corporate Real Estate governance framework, ensuring alignment with Legal, Ethics & Compliance, ESG and Enterprise Risk standards.

· Own CRE policies, standards, approval matrices, and delegations of authority in accordance with statutory requirements and Bill of Authority requirements.

· Ensure consistent governance across CREWS sub-functions, including Facilities, EHS, Security, Food & Beverage, Transport, Business Resilience, and Design & Project Management.

· Provide independent governance oversight for construction, design, refurbishment, and capital works programs, embedding governance checkpoints across the entire program and project lifecycle.

· Validate approvals, compliance, and readiness ahead of financial commitments, go-live milestones, and handover, including statutory safety documentation and compliance readiness.

· Identify, assess, and mitigate legal, financial, operational, and compliance risks by owning CRE risk registers, issue management, and remediation tracking.

· Govern CRE commercial and financial models, including cost-plus, fixed fee, and hybrid models, while validating KPIs, fee-at-risk constructs, and penalty/bonus mechanisms.

· Partner with Finance and FP&A to ensure transparency, auditability, and control of CRE spend.

· Establish third-party governance standards, risk classification, and compliance requirements, and ensure vendor adherence to third-party risk, ethics and anti-corruption standards.

· Provide governance oversight for major CRE transformations, outsourcing, and operating model changes, ensuring compliance is embedded without hindering business execution and supporting a smooth transition from project delivery to steady-state operations.

· Consistently demonstrate the Cognizant Way to Lead, operating with Personal Leadership (building trust, collaboration and inclusion), Organizational Leadership (driving vision and purpose, demonstrating a strategic and enterprise mindset, and creating and communicating a bold direction that inspires purpose), and Business Leadership (exemplifying client focus, managing ambiguity with accountability and results, and operating with financial acumen).