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

What This Role Is

Every year, universities across the world spend significant budget trying to reach the right international students. They run fairs, buy lists, work with agents, invest in digital campaigns. Most of them have a reasonable sense of where their international students come from. Very few have a clear picture of why. Which counsellors recommended them. Which platforms surfaced their programmes. Which moments in a student's journey actually shaped the decision to apply.

Explore was built to change that. Launched in 2025 as Manifest Global's university-facing platform, Explore gives institutions direct access to the largest global network of high school counsellors and students in the world, built on the combined reach of Cialfo and BridgeU across 1,750+ K12 schools in Asia-Pacific, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Universities use Explore to run targeted outreach campaigns, engage students earlier in their decision journey, and understand what's actually driving their international recruitment pipeline.

The platform is live. The university partner base is growing. The commercial model is being actively built. And the marketing function that drives Explore's growth, shapes how universities understand the product, and delivers the student engagement campaigns that make the platform valuable, doesn't yet exist at the scale or quality it needs to.

That's what this role builds.

The Head of Marketing, Explore owns two things simultaneously: growing Explore's university partner base through B2B marketing, and delivering high-quality student marketing campaigns to universities through the Cialfo and BridgeU network. Both matter commercially. Both require someone who can think strategically, build systems, and connect marketing activity directly to revenue outcomes. You'll report to the COO and operate with significant autonomy across a genuinely new product at a consequential stage of its growth.

What Makes This Role Different

Most marketing leadership roles in the university sector sit inside a single institution or a single channel. This one sits at the centre of a platform that connects hundreds of university partners to the largest K12 counsellor and student network in the world. The scale of what's possible from this seat is unusual.

Explore also has something most university marketing platforms don't: a genuine data and intelligence layer. The counsellor relationships, the student engagement data, and the platform infrastructure built across Cialfo and BridgeU give Explore the ability to offer universities insight into their international recruitment pipeline that no agent, fair, or outreach platform can match. The marketing function that communicates that clearly, to the right university buyers, in language that makes them act, is one of the most important things Explore can build right now.

The broader international education market is contracting. Explore is growing. Universities that are serious about their international recruitment strategy are looking for partners that offer more than volume. This is the right moment to be building the marketing function that makes Explore that partner, at scale.

What You Own

University growth and market expansion

• Own Explore's B2B marketing strategy globally, with clear accountability for university acquisition pipeline, conversion, and marketing's contribution to revenue
• Build positioning, narratives, and go-to-market approaches that make the Explore value proposition land with university international offices, recruitment teams, and senior leadership
• Lead integrated campaigns across content, events, partnerships, thought leadership, and digital channels, with a clear view of what each channel is for and what it needs to produce
• Partner closely with the commercial team to ensure marketing is generating the right pipeline and that the conversation between marketing and sales is tight enough to actually improve conversion
• Use AI to accelerate campaign production, improve targeting, and scale what the team can do without proportionally scaling headcount. Build the team's fluency with these tools as a core capability, not an afterthought

Student marketing campaign delivery

• Lead the planning, execution, and optimisation of university marketing campaigns delivered to students across Cialfo and BridgeU's network of 1,750+ schools
• Build scalable systems for campaign planning, delivery, reporting, and optimisation that can handle a growing university partner base without degrading quality
• Ensure every campaign delivered to students is genuinely engaging, operationally clean, and producing measurable outcomes for university partners
• Act as a strategic partner to universities on their student engagement strategy, not just a delivery function. The universities that trust Explore most are the ones who see the marketing team as an extension of their own recruitment capability

Brand and thought leadership

• Build Explore's brand reputation in the higher education market, establishing it as the platform that serious institutions choose when they want to understand and improve their international recruitment strategy
• Develop thought leadership content and institutional storytelling that speaks to the structural shifts happening in international student recruitment and positions Explore as the platform built for where the market is going
• Drive Explore's visibility at major higher education conferences, associations, and industry events across the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond

Team leadership and operations

• Build and lead a marketing team across growth, campaign delivery, content, and operations, with a culture of ownership and high standards
• Hire well, develop second-line leaders, and build a function that operates with enough infrastructure and accountability that it doesn't depend on you being in every decision
• Align the marketing function closely with revenue, product, and operations so that the team is working on the things that actually move the business forward

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Explore's marketing function is today. The product is new, the partner base is growing, and the commercial model is still being shaped. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

You'll start by building a thorough picture of the current state: what the university acquisition pipeline looks like, how campaign delivery is working, where the brand is strong and where it isn't, and what the highest-leverage marketing investments are. You'll have a clear view on where to move first.

From there, the marketing function will be measurably more connected to revenue. University acquisition campaigns will be generating better pipeline. Campaign delivery for university partners will be more scalable and more consistently excellent. The Explore brand will be better known among the university buyers that matter.

Over time, Explore will be recognised as the platform that understands international student recruitment better than anyone else in the market, and the marketing function will have played a material role in making that true. Universities that came in uncertain about the product will be renewing and expanding because the value is visible and the marketing function helped them see it.

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

What You Bring

You have significant experience in marketing leadership, with a track record that spans B2B growth marketing, campaign operations, or integrated marketing in a platform, SaaS, EdTech, or higher education context. You've built marketing functions before, not just contributed to them. You know what it takes to design the systems, hire the team, and hold the commercial accountability simultaneously.

You're genuinely commercially driven. You've been accountable for pipeline and revenue contribution, not just brand metrics and engagement rates. You can sit in a commercial review and speak about marketing's role in revenue in terms that a sales leader finds credible and that a CFO finds useful.

You understand the higher education sector well enough to speak its language and challenge its assumptions. You know how university international offices make decisions, what they value in a platform partner, and what it takes to move from a trial to a long-term relationship. You've worked with institutional buyers before and you know the difference between a conversation that's going somewhere and one that isn't.

You're genuinely open about AI as a marketing tool. You've used it seriously, you have a view on where it creates real leverage and where it produces mediocre output at speed, and you advocate for adoption because you've seen what it enables. You can build a team that uses AI with judgment.

You're comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with a new product at a growth stage. Explore is being built now. The playbook isn't finished. The person who thrives in this role finds that energising rather than unsettling.

Most importantly, you read about what Explore is building and thought: I understand exactly what universities need from this and I know how to build the marketing function that delivers it. That's who 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 counselling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counselling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach platform). 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, Explore sits at the point where the Manifest ecosystem meets the university market. The counsellor network, the student data, the K12 platform reach: all of it becomes commercially valuable to universities through Explore. The marketing function that makes that value visible, credible, and compelling is one of the most important things Explore can build right now. The person who builds it from this seat will have shaped how one of the most significant new products in international education marketing goes to market.

Explore is part of Manifest Global, a multi-brand group 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 operates four brands across 50+ countries, each serving a different part of the international education ecosystem. Cialfo works with 2,000+ schools and the counsellors inside them. BridgeU serves international schools across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East. Explore works with university partners on their international recruitment strategy. Kaaiser has been placing students from India and Southeast Asia into universities across Australia, the UK, Canada, and beyond since 1997.

Each of these businesses has a distinct audience, a distinct stage of market maturity, and a distinct story to tell. Right now, the content function that serves them is fragmented. There's no central engine, no shared infrastructure, no consistent standard for how Manifest's brands show up in writing across any channel. That gap is real and it costs us.

This role builds the engine that closes it.

The Head of Content, B2B will design and run a centralised content function that serves all four brands the way a high-performance internal agency would. You'll own the strategy, the team, the systems, the quality standard, and the connection between content output and commercial outcome. This is not a writing role or a channel management role. It's an operational leadership role for someone who thinks in systems, builds for scale, and understands that content without commercial consequence is just production.

What Makes This Role Different

Most senior content roles sit inside a single brand with a single ICP and a reasonably stable strategy. This one sits across four brands with different buyer types, different competitive landscapes, and different levels of market awareness.

That's genuinely complex. The person who does it well has to context-switch between the counsellor audience at Cialfo, the university admissions audience at Explore, the international school leadership audience at BridgeU, and the student-facing and agent-facing audiences at Kaaiser, without losing the thread of what makes each brand distinct. They also have to hold the group-level narrative together, making sure Manifest's overall positioning is coherent even when the brand-level stories are pointing in different directions.

The content landscape itself is also shifting fast. The channels, formats, and tools that defined B2B content marketing three years ago are not the ones that will define it three years from now. The person in this seat needs to be genuinely ahead of that shift, not catching up to it. That means going well beyond LinkedIn and traditional content playbooks, and it means using AI as a real capability multiplier rather than a productivity shortcut.

The Manifest group is growing while the broader overseas education sector is contracting. The content function that tells that story well, across the right channels, to the right audiences, at the right moment in their decision journey, is a genuine commercial lever. Building that function from this seat is the opportunity.

What You Own

Content strategy across all four brands

• Define distinct content strategies for Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser, grounded in the specific ICP, market maturity, and commercial goals of each business
• Translate those strategies into content-led growth plans that connect directly to pipeline, sales enablement, and customer education, not just traffic and engagement metrics
• Build and maintain the founder and authority-driven narratives that shape how each brand is perceived in its market, working closely with leadership to develop thought leadership platforms that earn attention rather than just occupy space
• Go beyond what B2B content has traditionally looked like: video, audio, community, interactive formats, channel partnerships, and distribution models that most content teams in this space haven't tried yet

The central content engine

• Design and operate a centralised content team structured as an internal agency, with clear pods, resource allocation across brands, and defined workflows that can scale without constant intervention
• Own the infrastructure: editorial calendar systems, production workflows, quality control frameworks, briefing standards, and the feedback loops that keep output improving over time
• Build AI into the team's operating model from the ground up, not as an experiment but as a core capability. Identify where AI accelerates ideation, research, production, and distribution, implement it, and build the team's fluency so that the function gets faster and better as the tooling improves
• Set the quality standard and hold it across every piece of content that goes out under any Manifest brand

Team leadership

• Lead a team of writers, strategists, freelancers, and agencies, and build second-line leaders who can run significant parts of the function independently
• Hire well and structure the team for the work it actually needs to do, not the work a generic content team does
• Actively develop the team's AI literacy, advocate for AI adoption across the broader marketing function, and model what it looks like to use these tools with judgment rather than just enthusiasm
• Move the function from execution support to strategic growth partner, which means changing both the team's capability and how the rest of the business thinks about what content is for

Content to revenue alignment

• Partner with Marketing, Sales, and Leadership across all four brands to ensure content is driving pipeline, supporting sales conversations, and educating customers in ways that move them forward
• Build systems to track content ROI and conversion impact, not vanity metrics. Know what is working, why it is working, and where to invest next
• Be the person who can sit in a commercial review and speak about content's contribution to the business in terms that the commercial team finds credible

Distribution and performance

• Own not just creation but distribution strategy, with a clear view of what each channel requires and how they work together. LinkedIn is part of that picture, not the whole picture
• Bring genuine curiosity to distribution channels and formats that most B2B content teams in this sector haven't fully explored: community-led content, podcast and audio formats, co-created content with university and school partners, event-based content systems, and whatever else the evidence suggests is worth building
• Build AI-assisted distribution and optimisation into the team's workflow, using it to personalise at scale, test faster, and improve performance without proportionally increasing headcount
• Continuously optimise based on performance data, and build the team's capability to do the same without needing direction on every decision

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the content function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

You'll start by building a clear picture of what exists across the four brands, what's working, what's missing, where the quality gaps are, and where the highest-leverage places to invest are. You'll have a point of view on where to build first and which channels and formats are most underexploited.

From there, the content engine will be taking shape. Editorial systems will be running. The team will have clear structure and clear ownership. AI will be embedded in how the team works, not bolted on. At least some of the brand narratives will be sharper than they were before you arrived, and there will be early evidence of content contributing to pipeline rather than just producing output.

Over time, Manifest will have a content function that the commercial teams across all four brands actively rely on, that builds genuine market authority for each brand, and that runs with enough infrastructure and second-line leadership that it doesn't depend on you being in every decision. That's what a well-built content engine looks like.

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

What You Bring

You have twelve to fifteen years in B2B content, content marketing, or brand strategy, and a meaningful part of that has been building and running functions rather than contributing to them. You've managed multi-brand or multi-product content before. You've led teams of five to twenty or more people. You know what it takes to build the systems that make a content team consistent and scalable, and you've done it in environments where the commercial expectations were real.

You think in workflows and resource allocation, not just editorial calendars. You've built briefing systems, quality control frameworks, and production infrastructure. You understand that the operational side of a content function is what makes the creative side sustainable.

You're commercially literate. You can connect a content decision to a business outcome and have that conversation with a sales leader or a CFO without needing to translate. You've built attribution and reporting systems that tracked something more meaningful than page views, and you know what good content ROI measurement actually looks like in practice.

You have a genuinely expansive view of what B2B content can be. You've built beyond LinkedIn and the standard playbook, and you have real examples of formats, channels, or distribution models that most teams in your space weren't doing. You're not done exploring.

You're openly enthusiastic about AI as a creative and operational tool. You've used it seriously, not just dabbled. You have a clear view of where it accelerates good work and where it produces mediocre output at speed, and you know how to build a team that uses it with that kind of judgment. You advocate for AI adoption because you've seen what it enables, not because it's the current thing to be seen adopting.

You can context-switch across different brand voices, buyer types, and market stages without losing clarity on what each brand needs. You've done this before, either in a multi-brand role or in an agency environment where the client roster demanded it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building across four brands and thought: I know exactly how to build the content function this needs. That's who 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 counselling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counselling 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.

For this role specifically, content is one of the primary ways Manifest's brands build authority and generate pipeline in markets where trust is the deciding factor. The counsellors, school leaders, university admissions officers, and agents that our brands serve are all operating in a world with a lot of noise. The content function that cuts through that noise, consistently, across four brands and multiple markets, is doing genuinely high-leverage work. Building that function from this seat is the opportunity.

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.

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.