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 part