What This Role Is

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility. The irony is not lost on anyone internally: a company whose mission is to connect talent to opportunity across borders needs to be exceptionally good at finding, attracting, and closing the right people itself. Right now, that function is not yet what it needs to be.

The hiring infrastructure exists. Greenhouse is live. Recruiters are in place across regions. Roles are being filled. But the function operates reactively — responding to requisitions rather than shaping teams, filling seats rather than building toward a hiring strategy that is six months ahead of the business. The pipelines for critical roles are thin. The employer brand is inconsistent across brands and geographies. Hiring manager confidence in the TA function is not where it should be.

That is what this role exists to change.

The Head of Talent Acquisition owns how Manifest hires — across all four brands, across Singapore, Delhi, London, and beyond — and is accountable for building a function that the business genuinely relies on. Not a support function that processes requisitions. A strategic capability that helps leadership make better decisions about their teams, moves fast on critical hires, and raises the quality of every person who joins the group.

This is one of the highest-leverage roles in the business. Rohan's view is explicit: talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. The person who builds the hiring engine that delivers on that belief will have shaped every other function in the group.

What Makes This Role Different

Most TA leadership roles are either operational — run the process, hit the numbers, manage the team — or strategic — sit in leadership meetings, advise on org design, produce frameworks. This one has to be both, and it has to be both simultaneously.

Manifest is a house of brands. Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser each have different talent markets, different hiring volumes, different seniority profiles, and different employer brand positions. Building a TA function that works across all four — without collapsing their distinctiveness into a generic group hiring process — requires someone who thinks in systems and executes in specifics.

It also requires someone who is comfortable being the person who raises the bar. The Head of TA at Manifest is not the person who makes hiring easier by lowering the standard when the pressure is on. They are the person who makes the case for the right hire even when the business wants to move fast. That is a harder role to play. It is also the one that makes the difference.

What You Own

The global hiring engine across all four brands

• Own hiring strategy across Manifest Global — all brands, all regions, all seniority levels — and ensure the function is operating ahead of business need, not reacting to it
• Drive workforce planning in genuine partnership with leadership: translate business priorities into hiring strategy, shape team structures before they become urgent, and give leaders a view of their talent pipeline that is forward-looking rather than backward-reporting
• Build the pipelines for critical and hard-to-fill roles before they are open — so that when the business needs a Head of Engineering or a Senior Director of K12, there is already a shortlist

The standard for what great looks like

• Define what exceptional looks like across different role types, seniority levels, and brands — and build the frameworks that make that standard consistent: structured interviews, scorecards, calibration processes, hiring manager enablement
• Own quality of hire as a metric that the business tracks and trusts — not just time-to-fill, but whether the people joining Manifest are the people who should be joining Manifest
• Be the person who challenges a hire when the evidence doesn't support it, and who builds the credibility with hiring managers to have that conversation productively

The TA team

• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of recruiters and sourcers across regions — set clear performance expectations, build a culture of ownership, and create a function that operates as a business partner rather than a processing unit
• Develop each person on the team with intention — they should be better recruiters and better strategic partners at the end of working for you than they were at the start
• Build the TA team's reputation internally so that hiring managers want to partner with them, not route around them

Data, metrics, and visibility

• Own the hiring metrics that matter: time-to-hire, quality of hire, pipeline conversion rates, offer acceptance, hiring manager satisfaction — and build the dashboards that give leadership real visibility into what is happening and why
• Identify bottlenecks systematically and fix them at the root — not by working harder on the symptom, but by understanding what in the process or the pipeline is causing it
• Give leadership the data and the context to make better decisions about hiring, team structure, and talent investment — not just numbers, but insight

Systems, process, and employer brand

• Own Greenhouse and the hiring workflows that sit around it — strengthen them, automate where it makes sense, and standardise globally while preserving the flexibility that different brands and geographies need
• Shape how Manifest shows up in the talent market across all four brands — consistent where it needs to be consistent, differentiated where the brands are genuinely different
• Ensure every candidate interaction — from first message to final decision — reflects the standard that Manifest's employer brand is being built to

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the TA function is today. The business will have moved by the time you join — new hires in progress, new priorities surfaced, new brands at different stages of growth. 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 state — the team, the pipelines, the processes, the metrics, the gaps between what the business needs and what the function is currently delivering. You'll have a point of view on where to move first and what the highest-leverage changes are.

From there, the function will be measurably better. Hiring managers will have more confidence in the TA team and the pipelines it builds. Critical roles will be filled faster and with better candidates. The team will be operating with more ownership and more commercial awareness than before.

Over time, hiring at Manifest will be a genuine competitive advantage — a function that the business builds strategy around rather than reacts to, that gives leaders real visibility into their talent pipeline, and that attracts people to Manifest who would not have found their way here otherwise.

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

What You Bring

You have eight or more years in talent acquisition, with meaningful global hiring experience and a track record of building TA functions in fast-growing, multi-market environments. You have hired for complex, business-critical roles — not just at volume, but for the kinds of hires that change what a business is capable of. You have built the processes that make hiring consistent without making it slow.

You are genuinely strategic with leadership. You can sit in a business planning conversation and contribute something useful — not just take the brief, but push back on it, add context, and help leaders think about their teams more clearly. You have done this before and you have the credibility to do it with senior stakeholders who are used to being the ones setting direction.

You are also comfortable being hands-on. At Manifest's stage, the Head of TA is not a function that delegates everything downward. There will be critical searches where you are in the candidate conversations directly. There will be hiring manager relationships that need to be built personally. You do not treat that as beneath the role — you treat it as part of what makes the function work.

You think in systems. You see a hiring bottleneck and you want to understand what is causing it at the structural level, not just fix the immediate case. You build processes that scale because you have thought through how they break under pressure, not just how they work when everything is running smoothly.

You are comfortable raising the bar even when the business wants to lower it. You have had the conversation with a hiring manager who wants to make an offer on a candidate who is not quite right, and you have had it in a way that was useful rather than obstructive. That is a skill. You have it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building and your first reaction was "talent acquisition done well is one of the most important things a company at this stage can get right — and I know how to get it right." 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), 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 that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. Every other function — product, engineering, operations, commercial — performs at the level of the people in it. The Head of TA is the person who shapes that level across the entire group. It is not a support function. It is the meta-lever. The person who builds the hiring engine at Manifest in the next twelve months will have done more to determine what this company becomes than almost any other hire the business makes.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.

What This Role Is

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility. The irony is not lost on anyone internally: a company whose mission is to connect talent to opportunity across borders needs to be exceptionally good at finding, attracting, and closing the right people itself. Right now, that function is not yet what it needs to be.

The hiring infrastructure exists. Greenhouse is live. Recruiters are in place across regions. Roles are being filled. But the function operates reactively — responding to requisitions rather than shaping teams, filling seats rather than building toward a hiring strategy that is six months ahead of the business. The pipelines for critical roles are thin. The employer brand is inconsistent across brands and geographies. Hiring manager confidence in the TA function is not where it should be.

That is what this role exists to change.

The Head of Talent Acquisition owns how Manifest hires — across all four brands, across Singapore, Delhi, London, and beyond — and is accountable for building a function that the business genuinely relies on. Not a support function that processes requisitions. A strategic capability that helps leadership make better decisions about their teams, moves fast on critical hires, and raises the quality of every person who joins the group.

This is one of the highest-leverage roles in the business. Rohan's view is explicit: talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. The person who builds the hiring engine that delivers on that belief will have shaped every other function in the group.

What Makes This Role Different

Most TA leadership roles are either operational — run the process, hit the numbers, manage the team — or strategic — sit in leadership meetings, advise on org design, produce frameworks. This one has to be both, and it has to be both simultaneously.

Manifest is a house of brands. Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser each have different talent markets, different hiring volumes, different seniority profiles, and different employer brand positions. Building a TA function that works across all four — without collapsing their distinctiveness into a generic group hiring process — requires someone who thinks in systems and executes in specifics.

It also requires someone who is comfortable being the person who raises the bar. The Head of TA at Manifest is not the person who makes hiring easier by lowering the standard when the pressure is on. They are the person who makes the case for the right hire even when the business wants to move fast. That is a harder role to play. It is also the one that makes the difference.

What You Own

The global hiring engine across all four brands

• Own hiring strategy across Manifest Global — all brands, all regions, all seniority levels — and ensure the function is operating ahead of business need, not reacting to it
• Drive workforce planning in genuine partnership with leadership: translate business priorities into hiring strategy, shape team structures before they become urgent, and give leaders a view of their talent pipeline that is forward-looking rather than backward-reporting
• Build the pipelines for critical and hard-to-fill roles before they are open — so that when the business needs a Head of Engineering or a Senior Director of K12, there is already a shortlist

The standard for what great looks like

• Define what exceptional looks like across different role types, seniority levels, and brands — and build the frameworks that make that standard consistent: structured interviews, scorecards, calibration processes, hiring manager enablement
• Own quality of hire as a metric that the business tracks and trusts — not just time-to-fill, but whether the people joining Manifest are the people who should be joining Manifest
• Be the person who challenges a hire when the evidence doesn't support it, and who builds the credibility with hiring managers to have that conversation productively

The TA team

• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of recruiters and sourcers across regions — set clear performance expectations, build a culture of ownership, and create a function that operates as a business partner rather than a processing unit
• Develop each person on the team with intention — they should be better recruiters and better strategic partners at the end of working for you than they were at the start
• Build the TA team's reputation internally so that hiring managers want to partner with them, not route around them

Data, metrics, and visibility

• Own the hiring metrics that matter: time-to-hire, quality of hire, pipeline conversion rates, offer acceptance, hiring manager satisfaction — and build the dashboards that give leadership real visibility into what is happening and why
• Identify bottlenecks systematically and fix them at the root — not by working harder on the symptom, but by understanding what in the process or the pipeline is causing it
• Give leadership the data and the context to make better decisions about hiring, team structure, and talent investment — not just numbers, but insight

Systems, process, and employer brand

• Own Greenhouse and the hiring workflows that sit around it — strengthen them, automate where it makes sense, and standardise globally while preserving the flexibility that different brands and geographies need
• Shape how Manifest shows up in the talent market across all four brands — consistent where it needs to be consistent, differentiated where the brands are genuinely different
• Ensure every candidate interaction — from first message to final decision — reflects the standard that Manifest's employer brand is being built to

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the TA function is today. The business will have moved by the time you join — new hires in progress, new priorities surfaced, new brands at different stages of growth. 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 state — the team, the pipelines, the processes, the metrics, the gaps between what the business needs and what the function is currently delivering. You'll have a point of view on where to move first and what the highest-leverage changes are.

From there, the function will be measurably better. Hiring managers will have more confidence in the TA team and the pipelines it builds. Critical roles will be filled faster and with better candidates. The team will be operating with more ownership and more commercial awareness than before.

Over time, hiring at Manifest will be a genuine competitive advantage — a function that the business builds strategy around rather than reacts to, that gives leaders real visibility into their talent pipeline, and that attracts people to Manifest who would not have found their way here otherwise.

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

What You Bring

You have eight or more years in talent acquisition, with meaningful global hiring experience and a track record of building TA functions in fast-growing, multi-market environments. You have hired for complex, business-critical roles — not just at volume, but for the kinds of hires that change what a business is capable of. You have built the processes that make hiring consistent without making it slow.

You are genuinely strategic with leadership. You can sit in a business planning conversation and contribute something useful — not just take the brief, but push back on it, add context, and help leaders think about their teams more clearly. You have done this before and you have the credibility to do it with senior stakeholders who are used to being the ones setting direction.

You are also comfortable being hands-on. At Manifest's stage, the Head of TA is not a function that delegates everything downward. There will be critical searches where you are in the candidate conversations directly. There will be hiring manager relationships that need to be built personally. You do not treat that as beneath the role — you treat it as part of what makes the function work.

You think in systems. You see a hiring bottleneck and you want to understand what is causing it at the structural level, not just fix the immediate case. You build processes that scale because you have thought through how they break under pressure, not just how they work when everything is running smoothly.

You are comfortable raising the bar even when the business wants to lower it. You have had the conversation with a hiring manager who wants to make an offer on a candidate who is not quite right, and you have had it in a way that was useful rather than obstructive. That is a skill. You have it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building and your first reaction was "talent acquisition done well is one of the most important things a company at this stage can get right — and I know how to get it right." 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), 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 that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. Every other function — product, engineering, operations, commercial — performs at the level of the people in it. The Head of TA is the person who shapes that level across the entire group. It is not a support function. It is the meta-lever. The person who builds the hiring engine at Manifest in the next twelve months will have done more to determine what this company becomes than almost any other hire the business makes.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.

What This Role Is

Every year, millions of students apply to university. The decision shapes the rest of their lives — which country they live in, which careers open to them, who they become. And for most of them, the school they attend is the single biggest determinant of how well that decision gets made: the counselor they meet with, the platform that counselor uses, the conversations that happen in the months before they hit submit.

Roughly 100 school groups in the world collectively educate over a million of these students. Beyond them sit Ministries of Education running entire state and national systems where every public school student passes through the same counseling infrastructure — or fails to. Both are buying decisions where one signature moves an entire system onto a platform. Both are conversations where the people on the other side are sceptical, time-poor, and have been disappointed by tech vendors before. Both are still mostly being made school by school, on a patchwork of tools and goodwill, by buyers who have never had a platform partner they truly trusted.

That is the gap. It is the most consequential gap in the K12 counseling market today, and closing it is what this role exists to do.

Cialfo is the world’s leading AI-powered college counseling platform, used by 2,000+ schools to guide students through this decision. The counselor workflow is built. The student experience is built. Saige, our AI layer, is live. The product is not the question. The question is whether the school groups and government systems who most need this platform choose Cialfo as the partner they bet a decade on.

The Senior Director, K12 is Cialfo’s most senior commercial voice in the global school market. You’ll own the global enterprise pipeline across school groups and Ministries of Education, lead the team selling into individual schools, and define how Cialfo wins this market over the next five years.

What Makes This Role Different

Most senior K12 sales roles sit inside a single region or a single buyer type. This one runs across three commercial channels — school groups, government systems, and individual schools — with a tailwind no competitor has.

Cialfo doesn’t walk into these conversations alone. BridgeU sits beside it, serving international schools across the UK and Europe. Explore sits behind it, the AI outreach platform trusted by 1,000+ universities in 100+ countries. Kaaiser brings nearly thirty years of placement infrastructure. No competitor in the K12 counseling space can offer a school group, a Ministry, or an accreditation body the connective tissue across the entire student journey from K12 to enrolment. You can. That changes what you can sell, what you can negotiate, and what a long-term partnership with Cialfo can mean.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Cialfo is growing. The next era of this platform will be built on the partnerships closed in the next eighteen months — and the person who closes them is you.

What You Own

School group partnerships

• Identify, develop, and close high-value institutional partnerships with school groups, multi-school operators, and global accreditation bodies
• Build relationships at the level where they get decided — principals, heads of school, board members, and network-level decision-makers whose signatures move entire systems onto the platform
• Navigate complex institutional procurement and structure agreements that anchor Cialfo as the default for the network for years, not transactions reviewed cycle to cycle

Ministry of Education deals

• Own the strategy and execution for selling Cialfo into Ministries of Education and equivalent national or state-level bodies that buy on behalf of entire public school systems
• Build credibility with senior government stakeholders — ministers, director-generals, and the senior civil servants who run education policy and procurement — and read the political dynamics that determine whether a deal closes
• Run formal procurement (RFPs, tenders, framework agreements) and build the response capability to win them, including references, case studies, and the partner ecosystem a Ministry expects to see
• Prioritise the few geographies where the political and policy environment makes a national-scale deployment realistic over the many that aren’t, and structure multi-year contracts a government can defend publicly and Cialfo can deliver against profitably

The team selling into individual schools

• Lead the IC team that wins single-school logos across regions — set the bar, coach the craft, sit in on the deals that matter
• Build the playbook that converts standalone schools inside priority networks, so every IC win becomes a foothold for a future group-level or government-level conversation
• Develop the next generation of Cialfo’s commercial leaders — because this team is where they get built, and you treat that as a primary part of the job

Strategic market development and ecosystem leverage

• Define where Cialfo should be winning that it is not yet — new geographies, new network types, new government systems, new institutional segments — and build the commercial case for moving there
• Use the full Manifest portfolio (BridgeU, Explore, Kaaiser) to construct partnership structures no standalone vendor can match: multi-brand engagements, joint programmes with university partners, relationships embedded at the system level
• Partner with the VP of Global K12 to shape go-to-market strategy and influence product priorities based on what you’re hearing in the market

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Cialfo’s K12 motion is today. The business will have moved by the time you join — new networks in scope, new geographies opened, new Ministries in conversation. We’ll calibrate the specifics together once you’re in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

You’ll start by building a complete picture of the current commercial landscape — the school groups that matter most, the government systems where Cialfo has a credible right to play, where the IC team is performing and where it isn’t. You’ll have a point of view on where to move first.

From there, things will be measurably better. The first lighthouse group deals will be closed or in late-stage negotiation. The first Ministry-level conversations will be running, with at least one credible procurement path identified. The IC team will be hitting a higher bar with a clearer playbook. The Manifest ecosystem story will be told consistently in every conversation.

Over time, Cialfo will be the default platform partner for serious international school groups across multiple regions, and will have won at least one national-system deployment that becomes a reference for the next ten. Group-level and government revenue will be a meaningful and growing share of K12 ARR. The pipeline for the following year will be anchored in relationships that compound for the next decade.

What You Bring

You’ve spent twelve to fifteen years in commercial roles, and a meaningful part of that has been closing enterprise deals where the buyer was a network or a government rather than a single decision-maker — in K12, higher education, public sector, or an adjacent institutional market where procurement is slow, political, and outcome-driven. You don’t lose patience when a partnership takes eighteen months to close. You’ve done it before.

You’ve sold to government before, or you’ve been close enough to it to know exactly what it takes — the RFP discipline, the political reading, the partner ecosystem you build before you can credibly bid, the patience to lose a cycle and come back stronger the next one. You don’t romanticise government sales and you don’t fear it. You see it for what it is: a slower, larger, more durable version of enterprise selling that pays back over a decade if you do it right.

You’ve led sales teams in high-stakes environments and built functions where the standard rises rather than drifts. You don’t see managing the team and personally landing the largest deals as competing demands — they’re the same job.

You think in markets, not territories. When you walk into a region you see the school networks, the Ministry priorities, the accreditation bodies, and the structural shifts that determine where the next ten years of growth comes from. You speak the language of education credibly — you can hold a real conversation about student outcomes and education policy, not just product features.

Most importantly, you read this 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, BridgeU, Kaaiser, and Explore. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We’re building the operating system that changes that. $91M raised. Still early.

The K12 platform sits at the front of that mission. The school groups and government systems that adopt it shape the trajectory of millions of students. The person who wins them from this seat is doing some of the most consequential commercial work in the group.

Five years from now, when a serious school group or Ministry of Education anywhere in the world thinks about how they will guide their students into the world’s universities, the platform partner they trust by default should be Cialfo. You are the person who makes that true.

About This Role

We are seeking a Strategic Operations Manager for the Strategic Operations division to work directly with the Chief Operating Officer (COO) on high-impact initiatives across the organization. This role sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and operational excellence, acting as an extension of the COO’s office to drive critical projects, manage key priorities, and ensure organizational alignment.

The ideal candidate is a highly organized operator with strong analytical thinking, excellent communication skills, and the ability to execute complex initiatives across multiple stakeholders. This role is best suited for someone who enjoys solving ambiguous problems, driving cross-functional projects, and managing both strategic and operational workstreams.

This role is critical to the success of the COO’s office and the broader organization, helping translate leadership priorities into operational outcomes, ensuring that key initiatives are executed effectively and efficiently.

What You Will Be Doing

• What You Will Execute on a Day to Day Basis:
  • You shall operate as a force multiplier for the COO by driving operational priorities, coordinating cross-functional execution, and ensuring decisions taken in leadership forums are followed through and implemented.
• Strategic Initiatives & Special Projects
  • Lead and execute high-priority strategic projects initiated by the COO across business units.
  • Conduct internal diagnostics to support decision-making.
  • Translate leadership priorities into structured plans, timelines, and deliverables.
  • Track progress of strategic initiatives and ensure timely execution.
• COO Office Operations
  • Act as a force multiplier for the COO, managing operational priorities and follow-ups.
  • Prepare briefing notes, executive presentations, reports, and dashboards for leadership meetings.
  • Support the COO in structuring internal initiatives and cross-team collaboration.
  • Ensure decisions taken in leadership forums are followed through and implemented.
• Cross-Functional Project Management
  • Coordinate projects across departments such as product, marketing, finance, and operations.
  • Identify operational bottlenecks and propose process improvements.
  • Drive accountability across teams to ensure project milestones and outcomes are achieved.
• Administrative & Execution Support
  • Manage project documentation, meeting preparation, and action tracking for COO initiatives.
  • Support the COO in organizing leadership reviews, strategic planning sessions, and operational updates.
  • Ensure smooth coordination between the COO and internal stakeholders.
• What You Will Lead, Strategize & Develop On A Regular Basis:
  • Strategic execution focuses on enabling leadership priorities through structured planning, performance tracking, and decision-ready reporting that supports organizational alignment and operational excellence.
• Data, Reporting & Insights
  • Build and maintain operational dashboards and performance tracking systems.
  • Analyze business metrics and provide insights to guide strategic decisions.
  • Prepare monthly and quarterly business review materials.

About You

You must be a highly organized operator with strong analytical thinking, excellent communication skills, and the ability to execute complex initiatives across multiple stakeholders. You should be comfortable working in ambiguity, managing multiple priorities simultaneously, and balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

• Qualifications:
  • 7+ years of experience in roles such as:
  • Experience working closely with C-Suite or Founders is strongly preferred.
• Skills:
  • Strong project management and execution skills
  • Excellent analytical and structured problem-solving ability
  • Ability to work across multiple teams and drive alignment
  • Strong written and verbal communication
  • High attention to detail with strong organizational discipline
• Knowledge:
  • Highly proactive and comfortable working in ambiguity
  • Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution
  • Strong ownership mindset with high accountability
  • Ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously
• You Are A Notch Above If You Have
  • Prior experience working closely with senior leadership or founders.
  • Demonstrated experience driving ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives end-to-end.
  • Strong comfort operating across both strategic workstreams and operational execution, with high ownership and accountability.

Cialfo is a leading platform connecting students, higher education institutions, and counselors through technology-driven solutions. Launched in 2017 with a mission to make education accessible to 100 million students, Cialfo provides a range of mobile and web solutions to students, K-12 institutions, and higher education institutions. We’re one of the fastest-growing tech startups in the region, consistently charting new heights!

This position is with Cialfo, one of the brands under Manifest Global, which also includes BridgeU, Explore and Kaaiser. 

About This Role

This is not a back-office finance role. You will be embedded in a business unit as its financial leader — sharing its targets, sitting in its reviews, and co-owning its commercial outcomes. Think of it as becoming the mini-CFO of the business unit you’re assigned to. You’ll bring a strong FP&A foundation — budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis — but those are the tools, not the job. The job is to use those tools to drive business growth, challenge decisions, and translate numbers into action.

We’re looking for someone who has already shown flashes of this — maybe you’ve challenged a pricing decision, flagged a commercial risk before anyone asked, or gone beyond the spreadsheet to influence a business outcome. You’re ready for a role where that’s the expectation every day, not the exception.

What You’ll Own

• Business Partnering & Commercial Impact
  • Serve as the embedded finance leader for your assigned business unit. You share their KPIs — revenue growth, margin, unit economics. You succeed when they succeed.
  • Sit alongside business leaders in commercial discussions — pipeline reviews, pricing decisions, investment cases — as a thought partner, not a scorekeeper.
  • Challenge assumptions with data. When the business unit proposes a new initiative, your job is to pressure-test it financially and offer alternatives, not just model what you’re told.
  • Translate financial data into clear, actionable recommendations that non-finance stakeholders can act on.
  • Drive accountability for business KPIs across your unit, ensuring financial outcomes stay aligned with strategic targets.
• FP&A Foundation
  • Own the full P&L forecasting cycle for your business unit — budgeting, monthly and quarterly forecasts, and variance analysis.
  • Build financial models from scratch — scenario analysis, sensitivity modeling, investment cases — rather than maintaining legacy templates.
  • Track and report on key metrics including revenue, margin, CAC, ROI, and cost efficiency, generating insights that drive decisions.
  • Identify risks and opportunities proactively by analysing growth trends, pipeline data, and margin movements.
  • Continuously improve and automate FP&A processes to free up time for higher-value partnering work.

You’ll Thrive Here If…

• You find yourself asking “So what?” and “What should we do about it?” when you look at a report, not just “Is this accurate?”
• You’ve worked in lean teams where you had to figure things out end-to-end, without large support structures or highly segmented finance functions.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity — you don’t need a playbook to be effective.
• You move naturally between strategy and execution. You can present to senior leadership in the morning and build a model in the afternoon.
• You’re curious about how the business actually works — not just the finance side of it.
• You’d rather influence an outcome than just report on one.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience & Qualifications
  • 8–10 years of experience in Finance, with a strong FP&A foundation.
  • You may not have held a formal “Business Partner” title, but you’ve consistently gone beyond reporting — you can point to specific business outcomes you’ve influenced through financial insight.
  • Experience in high-growth, fast-paced, or evolving business environments. You’ve operated where things aren’t perfectly defined and that’s where you do your best work.
  • Proficient in Excel and financial modeling. Knowledge of SQL or Python is a plus.
  • Diploma or degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, or a related field.
• Skills & Qualities
  • Strong analytical thinking and attention to detail, paired with the ability to see the bigger commercial picture.
  • Excellent communication skills — you can explain financial concepts to non-finance audiences clearly and persuasively.
  • Ability to drive projects end-to-end: problem definition, solutioning, stakeholder management, implementation, and tracking.
  • A hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset. You don’t wait to be told what to do.

What We Offer

A seat at the table from day one. You’ll have direct access to business unit leaders and senior management, with the platform and support to grow from a strong finance professional into a true commercial partner. We’ll invest in your development — you bring the curiosity and the drive.

Cialfo is a leading platform connecting students, higher education institutions, and counselors through technology-driven solutions. Launched in 2017 with a mission to make education accessible to 100 million students, Cialfo provides a range of mobile and web solutions to students, K-12 institutions, and higher education institutions. We’re one of the fastest-growing tech startups in the region, consistently charting new heights!

This position is with Cialfo, one of the brands under Manifest Global, which also includes BridgeU, Explore and Kaaiser. 

About This Role

This is not a back-office finance role. You will be embedded in a business unit as its financial leader — sharing its targets, sitting in its reviews, and co-owning its commercial outcomes. Think of it as becoming the mini-CFO of the business unit you’re assigned to. You’ll bring a strong FP&A foundation — budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis — but those are the tools, not the job. The job is to use those tools to drive business growth, challenge decisions, and translate numbers into action.

We’re looking for someone who has already shown flashes of this — maybe you’ve challenged a pricing decision, flagged a commercial risk before anyone asked, or gone beyond the spreadsheet to influence a business outcome. You’re ready for a role where that’s the expectation every day, not the exception.

What You’ll Own

• Business Partnering & Commercial Impact
  • Serve as the embedded finance leader for your assigned business unit. You share their KPIs — revenue growth, margin, unit economics. You succeed when they succeed.
  • Sit alongside business leaders in commercial discussions — pipeline reviews, pricing decisions, investment cases — as a thought partner, not a scorekeeper.
  • Challenge assumptions with data. When the business unit proposes a new initiative, your job is to pressure-test it financially and offer alternatives, not just model what you’re told.
  • Translate financial data into clear, actionable recommendations that non-finance stakeholders can act on.
  • Drive accountability for business KPIs across your unit, ensuring financial outcomes stay aligned with strategic targets.
• FP&A Foundation
  • Own the full P&L forecasting cycle for your business unit — budgeting, monthly and quarterly forecasts, and variance analysis.
  • Build financial models from scratch — scenario analysis, sensitivity modeling, investment cases — rather than maintaining legacy templates.
  • Track and report on key metrics including revenue, margin, CAC, ROI, and cost efficiency, generating insights that drive decisions.
  • Identify risks and opportunities proactively by analysing growth trends, pipeline data, and margin movements.
  • Continuously improve and automate FP&A processes to free up time for higher-value partnering work.

You’ll Thrive Here If…

• You find yourself asking “So what?” and “What should we do about it?” when you look at a report, not just “Is this accurate?”
• You’ve worked in lean teams where you had to figure things out end-to-end, without large support structures or highly segmented finance functions.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity — you don’t need a playbook to be effective.
• You move naturally between strategy and execution. You can present to senior leadership in the morning and build a model in the afternoon.
• You’re curious about how the business actually works — not just the finance side of it.
• You’d rather influence an outcome than just report on one.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience & Qualifications
  • 8–10 years of experience in Finance, with a strong FP&A foundation.
  • You may not have held a formal “Business Partner” title, but you’ve consistently gone beyond reporting — you can point to specific business outcomes you’ve influenced through financial insight.
  • Experience in high-growth, fast-paced, or evolving business environments. You’ve operated where things aren’t perfectly defined and that’s where you do your best work.
  • Proficient in Excel and financial modeling. Knowledge of SQL or Python is a plus.
  • Diploma or degree in Finance, Accounting, Business Administration, or a related field.
• Skills & Qualities
  • Strong analytical thinking and attention to detail, paired with the ability to see the bigger commercial picture.
  • Excellent communication skills — you can explain financial concepts to non-finance audiences clearly and persuasively.
  • Ability to drive projects end-to-end: problem definition, solutioning, stakeholder management, implementation, and tracking.
  • A hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset. You don’t wait to be told what to do.

What We Offer

A seat at the table from day one. You’ll have direct access to business unit leaders and senior management, with the platform and support to grow from a strong finance professional into a true commercial partner. We’ll invest in your development — you bring the curiosity and the drive.