Become a Startup CFO.

A Tax Auditor conducts statutory audits mandated under Section 44AB of the Income Tax Act, 1961 — an examination of books of accounts for businesses crossing the turnover threshold (₹1Cr for most businesses, ₹2Cr for those opting for presumptive taxation under 44AD, ₹10Cr for businesses with 95%+ digital transactions) and professionals crossing ₹50L gross receipts. The deliverable is Form 3CA/3CB (the audit report) and Form 3CD (a 44-clause statement covering everything from related-party transactions to deferred revenue expenditure). In India, only ICAI-empaneled Chartered Accountants can issue Form 3CA/3CB — the role is a statutory monopoly. Work is concentrated at Big-4 India tax practices (EY, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC), mid-tier firms (Grant Thornton Bharat, BDO, Nexdigm, SR Batliboi affiliates), and thousands of mid-to-small CA firms across tier-1 and tier-2 cities that together handle the long tail of SME tax audits. The busy season runs July–September each year, when the 30 September due date compresses months of audit work into weeks.

Risk Analysts measure and price the chance that something goes wrong on a bank's or insurer's balance sheet — borrowers defaulting (credit risk), markets moving against open positions (market risk), or operational failures like fraud, system outages, and KYC breaches (operational risk). They build statistical models — PD/LGD/EAD for credit, VaR and Expected Shortfall for market, scorecards for retail portfolios, capital models for ICAAP — and translate model output into limits, provisions, and capital requirements. In India, Risk Analysts sit inside private banks (HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak), public-sector banks (SBI, PNB), insurers (HDFC Life, ICICI Prudential, Bajaj Allianz), AMCs (Nippon, HDFC AMC), and the central bank itself (RBI's Department of Supervision and DEPR). The FRM (Financial Risk Manager) credential is the dominant signal alongside CFA — RBI Basel III norms, IRDAI risk-based capital, and SEBI mutual-fund risk frameworks make formally-credentialed risk talent scarce and well-paid.

A sell-side Research Analyst publishes equity research — initiation reports, earnings updates, and sector thematic notes — on listed companies for institutional clients (FIIs, domestic mutual funds, insurance AMCs, and hedge funds) via their brokerage's distribution network. In India the role lives at three tiers: domestic brokers with full-service research desks (Kotak Institutional Equities, Motilal Oswal Institutional Equities, JM Financial, Axis Capital, Nuvama Institutional, ICICI Securities Institutional Equities); regional desks of foreign brokerages (Jefferies India, Macquarie India, Morgan Stanley India, JP Morgan India, CLSA, Bernstein); and KPO research-support arms that feed onshore desks. Compensation is procyclical — base is a fraction of total; bonus ties directly to broker-commission revenue generated by the analyst's coverage and to their ranking in the Institutional Investor (II) Asia / Asiamoney sell-side polls, which are voted on annually by buy-side PMs. SEBI Research Analyst Regulations 2014 require all Indian sell-side analysts to register as NISM Series-XV certified Research Analysts before publishing or co-signing any report.

Business Analysts in financial services are the bridge between business stakeholders and technology / operations teams — they gather requirements, document AS-IS and TO-BE processes, write functional specifications, run UAT, and drive change-management for projects ranging from core-banking upgrades to RBI / SEBI compliance rollouts to GST automation and digital-onboarding programmes. Distinct from a Data Analyst (who works with numbers and dashboards), the Business Analyst is process-led: they sit in workshops, run JAD sessions, write BRDs and FRDs, and shepherd projects through approval gates. In India this role is concentrated at the BFSI verticals of TCS, Infosys (Finacle, Finacle Digital), Wipro, Cognizant, Capgemini, Tech Mahindra, and at the Big-4 advisory practices (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC) — supporting projects at HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI, Axis Bank, NSE, BSE, depositories, AMCs, and global banks' India captives. The career ladder runs Associate BA → BA → Senior BA → Lead / Principal BA → Practice Head / Engagement Manager.

Treasury Analysts manage the cash, foreign-exchange, and debt position of a corporate or bank — making sure the company has enough liquidity to operate, hedging exposure to currency and interest-rate moves, raising debt at the lowest cost, parking surpluses safely, and maintaining bank relationships across India and offshore. The work blends short-term operational rigour (daily cash position, NEFT / RTGS sweeps, intercompany funding) with structural finance decisions (₹500-Cr bond issuance, ECB drawdowns, USD-INR forwards, working-capital lines, commercial paper). In India, treasury is the highest-stakes finance function at large conglomerates — Tata Group, Reliance, Aditya Birla, Adani, Mahindra, JSW, Vedanta — and at the treasury desks of HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis, SBI, and the global capability centres of US / EU banks (Goldman Sachs Bengaluru, JPMorgan Mumbai, Bank of America Continuum). The career runs Treasury Analyst → Senior Analyst / Manager → Senior Manager / AVP → Head of Treasury / Treasurer, with very few seats at the top — most large Indian companies have only 1-3 Senior Treasury Manager roles and one Treasurer / Head of Treasury seat.

Anti-Money Laundering Analysts investigate suspicious financial activity to prevent criminal funds from entering the formal banking system. The role centres on reviewing alerts generated by transaction monitoring systems (Actimize, SAS AML, Tookitaki), conducting Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) on high-risk customers, screening transactions and counterparties against OFAC, UN, and MHA sanctions lists, and drafting Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) filed with the Financial Intelligence Unit — India (FIU-IND) under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA). In India, AML analysts work inside the compliance teams of scheduled commercial banks (HDFC, ICICI, Axis, Kotak, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, Citi), Big-4 forensic advisory practices (KPMG Forensic, EY FIDS, PwC Forensics), and the fast-growing KPO/GCC segment (Genpact, EXL, WNS) servicing global financial institutions remotely from Gurugram, Bengaluru, and Mumbai.

A Private Equity Associate is the deal engine of a buy-side investment fund — sourcing, diligencing, modelling, executing, and monitoring control or significant-minority investments in private and listed companies. India's PE landscape splits into tiers: global mega-funds (Blackstone India, KKR India, Carlyle, Advent, Bain Capital, TPG, Warburg Pincus); domestic large-caps (ChrysCapital, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, True North, Kedaara); growth-stage (Lightbox, A91 Partners, Premji Invest, Westbridge); and sector-specialists (Everstone for consumer, Apax in tech). Associates spend their days building LBO models with PE-grade debt waterfalls, running commercial-due-diligence with consultants (Bain, McKinsey, EY-Parthenon), reviewing legal-DD red flags, drafting Investment Committee (IC) memos, sitting in management presentations, and tracking 4-8 portfolio-company KPI packs. The role rewards judgement, pattern-matching across deals, and the ability to write a clear thesis under contested information. Most Associates enter from 2-3 years of investment banking (Goldman, JP Morgan, Kotak IBD, Avendus, Citi) or top-tier consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG); a smaller cohort enters post-IIM-A/B/C / ISB / M7 MBA. SEBI-regulated as Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) — Category I, II, or III. Compensation is base + bonus + carry (carried interest), with carry being the asymmetric long-game payoff that defines the career economics.

Senior: ₹2.2Cr

Product Managers discover, define, and deliver products that solve real user problems while meeting business goals. They sit at the intersection of engineering, design, and business — running discovery interviews, writing PRDs, prioritising the roadmap, working with engineers daily through delivery, and owning outcome metrics like activation, retention, and revenue. Unlike a project manager (who owns timelines) or a business analyst (who documents requirements), a PM owns the why and the what: deciding which problems are worth solving and ensuring the team ships a solution users actually adopt.

Senior: ₹90.0L

Fintech Product Managers own the strategy, design, and delivery of regulated payment, lending, and wealth surfaces — UPI payment rails, BNPL checkout flows, eKYC onboarding funnels, NACH mandate automation, and SEBI-regulated mutual fund journeys. Unlike a generic PM who owns a feature backlog, a Fintech PM must co-author product specs with RBI compliance teams (PA/PG/PPI master directions, ULI guidelines), select and integrate KYC vendors (Karza, IDfy, Hyperverge, Signzy), and manage PSP/NPCI/Cashfree API dependencies that sit entirely outside engineering's control. The India market defines the role: UPI processes over 14 billion transactions per month, PhonePe, CRED, Razorpay, Jupiter, Zerodha, Groww, and Slice all have PM roles where regulatory knowledge is a first-class job requirement alongside data literacy and roadmap ownership.

Senior: N/A

Cardiologists in India diagnose and treat diseases of the heart and circulatory system — running OPD clinics for hypertension and chest pain, reading ECGs and echocardiograms, performing coronary angiograms, placing stents in blocked arteries, implanting pacemakers and ICDs, managing heart-failure patients, and being the doctor on the line when a STEMI rolls into the ER at 3 AM. The path is the longest in Indian medicine: MBBS (5.5 years including 1-year rotating internship) via NEET-UG, then MD General Medicine (3 years) via NEET-PG / INI-CET, then DM Cardiology (3 years) via NEET-SS or DrNB Cardiology — a total of 11.5 years post-Class 12 before independent consultant practice. DM Cardiology is the single most-competitive super-specialty seat in India, with AIIMS / PGIMER / SGPGI / NIMS Hyderabad / SCTIMST Trivandrum top-100 cut-offs across all-India NEET-SS rankings. Workplaces split four ways: large private chains (Apollo, Fortis Escorts, Manipal, Max, Medanta — where the senior interventional cardiologist is the highest-earning doctor in the building), government super-specialty institutes (AIIMS Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh, SGPGI Lucknow, JIPMER, NIMHANS, NIMS Hyderabad, SCTIMST, IGIC Kolkata), standalone cardiac specialty hospitals (Narayana Health, Sri Sathya Sai Hospitals, Madras Medical Mission, Asian Heart Institute, Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital), and private practice with hospital visiting consultancies. The defining 2026 reality: India is the global capital of cardiovascular disease — South Asians develop coronary artery disease 5-10 years earlier than other populations, the patient pipeline is structurally vast, and procedure volume drives an income ceiling unmatched in Indian medicine, with star interventional cardiologists at top private chains routinely clearing ₹2-5 Cr per year through procedure-based incentive structures.

Senior: ₹1.2Cr

Plastic Surgeons in India operate across two interlocking practices: reconstructive surgery (burn management with split-thickness and full-thickness skin grafts, cleft lip/palate repair using Millard or Tennison-Randall techniques, free flap microsurgery for post-oncological and post-traumatic defects, hand surgery including replantation and tendon reconstruction) and cosmetic/aesthetic surgery (rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, rhytidectomy, breast augmentation with Baker Grade monitoring, abdominoplasty, liposuction, hair transplant via FUE/FUT). The canonical path is MBBS + MS General Surgery + M.Ch Plastic Surgery (3 years via NEET-SS) at AIIMS, PGI Chandigarh, KEM Mumbai, CMC Vellore, or PGIMER — giving access to both high-volume reconstructive units (burn wards, trauma centres, cancer reconstructive teams at Tata Memorial) and a premium cosmetic practice in metro cities. Aesthetic-only clinics such as Sculpt India, Cocoona, and Anti-Clock have created a parallel high-income private track; senior cosmetic practitioners in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, and Bengaluru clear ₹2–8 Cr annually.

Senior: ₹2.0Cr