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.
START A CONVERSATIONIn every traded market — crude, gas, freight, rates — contango is the state in which the future is priced above the present: the market pays a premium today for value delivered tomorrow. That is the logic of retained search. Our clients invest ahead of delivery because the right commercial leader is worth more than today’s price. If you run a book, a desk, or an energy business, you already speak our language.
We do one thing: commercial roles in energy. No technical searches, no volume recruitment — the desks and the corner offices where the P&L lives.
Heads of desk, senior traders, originators and charterers across crude, products, gas, LNG, power and freight — physical and paper.
Heads of research and senior analysts across oil, upstream, downstream, and gas & power — the balances, fundamentals and price views the desk actually trades on.
Gas and fuels marketing leadership, key-account and channel heads, business development for refiners, city gas distributors and new-energy ventures.
Chief commercial officers, heads of supply & optimisation, contracts and structuring leadership, commercial finance and strategy.
Oil & gas at the core — refining, fuel retail, lubricants — extending across LNG and regasification, city gas distribution, petrochemicals, renewables and the energy-transition ventures of India’s private sector.
Energy majors and their Indian ventures, trading houses building India desks, refiners and CGD players scaling commercial teams, and investors who need P&L leadership for energy platforms.
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.
Asia’s pricing and trading hub — where the region’s commercial talent is benchmarked and hired.
The world’s fastest-growing large energy market, and the centre of our client base and network.
The Gulf’s commercial gateway — trading, supply and the capital linking producers to Asian demand.
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.
The person you brief is the person who calls candidates and writes the shortlist. Nothing about your mandate is passed down a chain.
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.
Compensation counsel grounded in live market data across the corridor — what the role clears in Singapore, Mumbai or Dubai, not last year’s survey.
Gaurav is an executive search consultant who has spent his career at the intersection of commercial talent and Asian markets — most recently as a partner building a corporate-services search practice across India, Singapore and Southeast Asia.
He founded Contango Search on a conviction: that the energy industry’s commercial bench — the people who trade, originate, market and optimise — deserves a search firm that speaks its language and is accountable the way its clients are: on delivery.
Contango Search is built so that senior attention is the default rather than the exception — a standard the firm holds to on every mandate it accepts.