Energy Executive Search

CONTANGO Search — retained executive search for commercial leadership in energy

Leadership, marked to market.

Retained executive search for the commercial heart of the energy industry — the traders, originators, analysts, marketers and P&L leaders who turn molecules into margin.

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Practice

Commercial leadership, exclusively

We run one desk: front-office commercial leadership in energy — the desks and the corner offices where the P&L lives. Revenue-generating and market-intelligence mandates only.

Trading

Desk heads, senior traders and portfolio managers across crude, products, gas, LNG, power and freight — physical and paper, term and spot.

Origination

Structuring and supply leads who build the deal before the trader prices it — feedstock agreements, offtake, and new-market entry.

LNG

Origination, structuring and portfolio roles across term SPAs, spot cargoes and terminal capacity, as the region's import build-out accelerates.

Gas Distribution

Commercial and BD leadership inside gas distributors — CNG/PNG volume growth, key accounts, and the marketing heads scaling network reach.

Research & Market Intelligence

Heads of research and senior analysts across oil, upstream, downstream, and gas & power — the balances, fundamentals and price views the desk actually trades on.

Across each of these, we also place the commercial finance leads and heads of supply & optimisation who sign off on the deal.

Where else we reach

Petrochemicals, fuel retail and lubricants, renewables and the wider energy-transition ventures that sit alongside these five desks.

Who we serve

Energy majors and their new ventures, trading houses building India desks, refiners and gas distributors scaling commercial teams, and investors who need P&L leadership for energy platforms.

Geography

The corridor

Commercial energy talent moves along one axis: Singapore’s trading floors, India’s demand growth, and the deal flow of the Gulf. We live on that corridor — based in the National Capital Region, at home in all three markets.

Singapore

Where the desks are

Asia’s pricing and trading hub — where the region’s commercial talent is benchmarked and hired.

India

Where demand grows

The world’s fastest-growing large energy market, and the centre of our client base and network.

Dubai

Where the deals flow

The Gulf’s commercial gateway — trading, supply and the capital linking producers to Asian demand.

Approach

Partner-led, retained, accountable

  1. The brief is a market view

    We start with the business problem — the book you need to build, the margin you need to defend — not a job description. Market mapping before outreach, always — you'll have it inside two weeks.

  2. The partner runs the search

    The person you brief is the person who calls candidates and writes the shortlist. One person, start to finish — not passed down a chain.

  3. Candidates as business cases

    Every shortlist profile is written as an investment case: the problem this leader solves, the evidence, and the risks — marked to market against the field. You'll have it in writing before you meet anyone.

  4. Straight talk on price

    Compensation counsel grounded in live market data across the corridor — what the role clears in Singapore, Mumbai or Dubai, not last year’s survey.

Founder

Who you’ll work with

Gaurav Yadav, Founder and Managing Partner of Contango Search
Gaurav Yadav

Founder & Managing Partner

Delhi NCR, India

Gaurav has worked in executive search since 2008. He moved to Singapore in 2011 and spent the years that followed recruiting exclusively across energy, metals and mining — almost all of it commercial, and much of it in gas and power, LNG and downstream, alongside the consulting and market-intelligence houses whose price views the desks trade on.

Since then he has seen energy hiring from three sides: the specialist search desk, where he went on to build a firm’s commercial practice; the client side, running talent for an energy services business across eight Asia-Pacific markets; and the business-building side, opening a global search firm’s India office and the research team behind it.

Contango Search is a deliberate return to the first of those. Gaurav founded it on a conviction — that the commercial bench in energy, the people who trade, originate, market and optimise, deserves a search firm that speaks its language and is judged, as they are, on what it delivers.