Head of Operations

What This Role Is

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across India decide they want to study abroad. They choose a destination, find a counselor or agent, start an application — and then enter a process that, for most of them, is opaque, slow, and full of friction. Documents go missing. Deadlines are missed. University portals time out. Applications that should take days take weeks. The student is waiting. The university is waiting. And somewhere in the middle, the operational infrastructure either holds or it doesn't.

At Manifest Global, the student placements function is the engine that makes this work at scale. Across destinations — UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond — thousands of student applications move through a system that has to be fast, accurate, and consistent, every intake cycle, without fail. Application preparation, submission, tagging, tracking, university coordination, invoicing — every step in that chain has to run cleanly for the business to convert at the rate it needs to and realise the revenue it has built.

Right now, the infrastructure exists. The volume is growing. What's needed is the person who owns it — not just manages it, but builds it into something that scales without breaking, performs under pressure, and improves measurably cycle over cycle. That's what this role is.

The Head of Operations, is the operational authority for the student placements function across Manifest Global. You'll own the full application lifecycle, the team that executes it, the metrics that measure it, and the processes that hold it together when volume is high and timelines are tight. This is a leadership role for someone who has built operations in high-volume environments before and knows exactly what great looks like, and who wants that operational foundation to be the launchpad for something bigger: building the central operating infrastructure for a multi-brand, multi-country group that's still expanding.

What Makes This Role Different

Most operations leadership roles in student placements sit inside a single brand or a single corridor. This one doesn't.

The student placements function at Manifest spans multiple brands and multiple destinations. The volume is real, the commercial stakes are direct — application velocity and conversion rates connect immediately to revenue — and the infrastructure is still being actively built. You're not inheriting a finished system and being asked to run it. You're inheriting a function that works and being asked to make it scale.

The Manifest ecosystem behind this role is also genuinely differentiated. Cialfo's school network, BridgeU's international school relationships, Kaaiser's counselor and agent network, Explore's university partnerships — these are all feeding into the student placements pipeline. The person in this seat has visibility across all of it and the authority to build operational infrastructure that works across the full group, not just one brand.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Manifest's student placements business is growing. That's the environment this role sits in, and it's the reason the operational infrastructure matters so much right now.

Where This Function Is Going

The student placements function is not a back-office operation. It is the growth engine of the Manifest group — the layer that converts the group's two biggest assets into revenue: the demand network (2,000+ schools via Cialfo and BridgeU) and the supply network (1,000+ university partnerships via Kaaiser and Explore). Every structural advantage Manifest has built over a decade converges at this function. The person running its operations is running the engine itself.

The mandate is expanding on four fronts:

Multi-brand operating hub. This function is being built as the central operations backbone for the entire group — serving Cialfo, Kaaiser, and every brand that joins the portfolio. As the group expands, new businesses will plug into the infrastructure this role builds. You're not running one brand's ops; you're designing the operating system that every current and future brand runs on.

D2C expansion. Manifest is preparing to enter the direct-to-consumer segment. The operational chassis for that business will be designed and run from this seat. The person in this role will shape how a new business line is stood up, integrated, and scaled from day one.

New business integration. As the portfolio grows, the operational playbook for bringing new businesses into the group — their teams, processes, systems, and pipelines — will be owned here. The ability to absorb and scale new business lines cleanly is a core strategic muscle for Manifest, and this role builds it.

AI-native operations. The operations unit is being rebuilt as an AI-native function, and this role leads that transformation. You own the agenda — where AI replaces manual work in the application lifecycle, where it augments the team, and where it has no business being — and you set the roadmap Product and Technology build against. This is not a mandate to adopt tools as they arrive. It's a mandate to define what gets built, hold the standard for what ships, and re-architect the function around it. The target is an operation whose cost-to-serve and turnaround times improve as volume grows, instead of one that scales by adding headcount.

What You Own

The full student application lifecycle

- Own end-to-end business operations across all major study destinations, for all of the source markets across the globe.

- Ensure every stage runs with the speed, accuracy, and consistency that high-volume placements require, not just during normal periods but at peak intake when the system is under maximum pressure

Group-level operating infrastructure

- Design the central operations hub that serves all Manifest brands — shared workflows, shared systems, shared standards — so that every new brand, corridor, or business line plugs into proven infrastructure rather than rebuilding from scratch

- Own the operational readiness and integration of new business lines, including the upcoming D2C business, from process design and systems setup through team structure and steady-state handover

- Partner directly with group leadership on capacity planning, prioritisation, and the operational implications of expansion strategy — this role sits close to where growth decisions are made, because it's the function that has to absorb them

Operational infrastructure and process design

- Design and implement scalable, structured workflows that can absorb increasing application volumes without degrading quality or turnaround times

- Define and enforce clear SLAs, quality benchmarks, and processing standards across all destinations and team members

- Identify bottlenecks before they become crises, build the visibility and the processes to surface problems early and fix them systematically

- Lead the AI transformation of the operations unit — own the transformation roadmap, define and prioritise what Product and Tech build for operations, and redesign roles, workflows, and team structure around AI rather than layering tools on top of legacy process

Metrics, data, and performance

- Build dashboards and reporting that give the business a real-time view of pipeline movement and operational health — not lagging indicators, but live visibility

- Use data to manage capacity, prioritisation, and risk proactively, so the team is never surprised by what's coming

Team leadership

- Lead and develop the student placement operations team — set clear roles, responsibilities, and performance expectations, and build a culture where accountability is the norm and ownership is real

- Develop the team to perform at peak intake without degrading quality — the measure of a well-run operations function is how it performs when it's hardest, not when it's easiest

University and partner coordination

- Work closely with university partners, counsellors, and partner teams to ensure alignment on submission standards, timelines, and documentation requirements

- Reduce friction at every handoff point — between the team and universities, between the team and counselors, between destinations — so that the application moves cleanly through the system from start to finish

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the student placements function is today. The business will have moved by the time you join — new volume targets set, new destinations in scope, new priorities surfaced. We'll calibrate the specifics together once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

That said, the shape of success is clear.

You'll start by building a complete picture of the current operational infrastructure — what's working, what's breaking, where the bottlenecks are, and what the highest-leverage improvements look like. You'll have a point of view on where to move first and what the function needs to look like to handle the volume that's coming.

From there, things will be measurably better. Turnaround times will be faster. Submission accuracy will be higher. The team will have clearer roles and stronger capability. The metrics will show it.

Over time, the student placements operation will be a genuine competitive advantage — a function that processes at scale without errors, converts at the rates the business needs, and runs consistently across intake cycles without heroics from individuals. The infrastructure you build will outlast the intake it was built for.

And the function will run measurably differently from how it runs today: work that took a person will be done by a system, and the team's time will be spent on judgment and exceptions, not processing.

Beyond the placements function itself, success means the operations hub you've built becomes the default answer to "how do we run this?" for every new business Manifest adds. When the D2C business launches, it launches on your infrastructure. When a new brand enters the portfolio, your playbook is what makes it productive in months instead of years. The scope of this role grows with the group, and the group is growing fast.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You've spent twelve to fifteen years in operations, and a meaningful part of that has been in student placements, international admissions, or study abroad. You understand the application lifecycle end to end, not from a policy document, but from having run it. You know where it breaks, what causes delays, and how to build systems that don't depend on the same person catching the same problem every time.

You've led teams in high-volume environments before. You know that operational culture is set by what gets measured, what gets escalated, and what gets ignored, and you've built functions where accountability is real and performance expectations are clear. You don't accept that peak intake has to mean chaos. You've planned for it before and you know how to do it again.

You're metrics-driven in the way that actually matters: not because the numbers look good in a report, but because you use them to make decisions. You look at turnaround time data and you know what it's telling you about where the process is breaking. You look at conversion rates and you know which stage of the lifecycle is the constraint. You build the dashboards you need to manage the function, not the ones that make it look managed.

You're comfortable with ambiguity and with building. The student placements function at Manifest is growing and the infrastructure is still being actively shaped. There's no finished playbook to inherit. There are real problems to solve, real volume to handle, and real commercial outcomes riding on how well the operation runs.

Most importantly, you read the description of what this function is building and your first reaction was "I know exactly what needs to happen here." That's the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility — connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), EduGo Abroad, FlowAI and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

The student placements business sits at the commercial heart of that mission. When a student from India enrols at a university in Australia or the UK, that placement is the moment the entire ecosystem — the school platform, the counselor network, the university partnership, the outreach infrastructure — converts into a real outcome for a real person. The operations function that makes that happen at scale is not a support function. It's the engine. The person who builds and runs that engine from this seat is doing some of the most consequential operational work in the group.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.