What This Role Is
The infrastructure for global human capital mobility is not built by platforms alone. It is built by the relationships that sit underneath them: the government that agrees to a bilateral education framework, the university system that commits to a decade-long enrolment partnership, the enterprise that decides to route its talent pipeline through a single trusted operator. These are not transactions. They are architectural decisions that shape how talent moves across borders for a generation.
Manifest Global has built something that did not exist five years ago: a multi-brand platform infrastructure spanning K12 counseling, university guidance, student placements, and AI-powered university outreach, operating across 50+ countries. The platform is real. The data is real. The school and university network is real. What the group has not yet fully built is the commercial layer that takes that infrastructure to the institutions, governments, and enterprise partners that can scale it fastest, and the person who opens the corridors that no individual brand can reach alone.
That is what this role exists to do. Not to manage a sales team within one brand. Not to optimise a pipeline that already exists. This is the group-level commercial mandate: to identify and open the highest-leverage partnerships across every Manifest business, to build the government and institutional relationships that create durable, compounding revenue, and to develop the new commercial frontiers, workforce, employers, bilateral education agreements, transnational education, that sit beyond what any single brand currently owns.
The Manifest flywheel accelerates when more institutions, governments, and enterprise partners join the ecosystem. More school groups choosing the K12 platform means more students. More students means more data. More data means better recommendations and higher conversion. More university revenue funds the platform. The platform improves, and more schools join. This role is the person who opens that flywheel at the institutional level: the partnerships that are too large, too cross-brand, or too strategically significant for any single business unit to own.
You are the group's most senior commercial operator outside the CEO. You work alongside the business unit leaders, not above them. But you go where they cannot: across brand lines, across geographies, into government relationships and enterprise accounts that require the full weight of the Manifest group behind them.
What Makes This Role Different
Most senior commercial roles at growth-stage companies are optimisation roles. You inherit a market, a pipeline, and a playbook, and you execute better than your predecessor. This is not that. The mandate here is genuinely open-ended in a way that few roles at this level are: the commercial frontiers Manifest has not yet crossed are larger than the ones it has. Workforce infrastructure, employer partnerships, bilateral government agreements, transnational education frameworks. None of these are fully built. The person in this seat writes the playbook, not inherits it.
There is also the matter of the asset base you are working with. Manifest's network, 2,000+ K12 partner schools, 1,000+ university partners across 100+ countries, established corridors across India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, is a commercial asset that most operators in this space spend careers trying to build and never reach. You are arriving with it already in place. The question is not how to build the network. It is what to do with it at institutional and government scale.
The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Manifest is growing. That is not coincidence. It is the result of owning the full infrastructure stack at a moment when standalone players are being squeezed. The timing of this role matters: the window to establish Manifest as the default institutional partner for governments and enterprise in the corridors that matter most is open now, and it will not stay open indefinitely.
What You Own
Group-level enterprise and institutional partnerships
- Identify, develop, and close the highest-leverage partnerships across the Manifest group: school groups, university systems, government ministries, multilateral education bodies, and enterprise employers
- Own the relationships that are too large, too cross-brand, or too strategically significant for any single business unit to manage alone
- Bring the relevant business unit leaders into partnerships where brand-specific execution is required, while maintaining group-level ownership of the relationship and the commercial outcome
- Build and manage the pipeline of institutional partnerships that generates durable, compounding revenue across the group
Government and bilateral partnerships
- Lead Manifest's engagement with government ministries, education authorities, and workforce agencies across India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and beyond
- Develop bilateral education and workforce frameworks that create structural, long-term commercial relationships between Manifest and sovereign institutions
- Build relationships with bodies including VFS, ICEF, and equivalent multilateral stakeholders that create channel leverage across multiple corridors simultaneously
- Position Manifest as the infrastructure partner of choice for governments building international education and workforce mobility strategies
New commercial frontiers
- Own the commercial development of territories that sit beyond any existing brand's current mandate: workforce mobility, employer partnerships, talent infrastructure, transnational education
- Lead and grow new initiatives from inception through to commercial viability: build the thesis, test the market, establish the partnerships, and either scale within Manifest or hand off to a business unit with a functioning commercial model
- Identify where Manifest's existing network and data create unfair commercial advantages in adjacent markets and build the case for entering them
- Work with the CEO on new business opportunities that could become standalone revenue lines or strategic acquisitions
Commercial organisation and team building
- Build and lead the group partnerships team: identify the leaders, hire them, develop them, and create the culture and operating standards that make the team a genuine commercial force
- Champion commercial best practices across the Manifest group: not just within your own team, but as a standard-setter for how enterprise and institutional partnerships are developed across every brand
- Bring in culture carriers who raise the commercial ceiling of the organisation, not just fill headcount
Market intelligence and strategic positioning
- Own Manifest's understanding of where the institutional and government market is moving: which corridors are opening, which are contracting, where regulatory change creates commercial opportunity
- Translate market intelligence into commercial strategy: where to invest, what to prioritise, what to walk away from
- Represent Manifest externally at the level of institutional credibility, at conferences, government forums, and multilateral bodies, that builds the group's reputation as a serious infrastructure partner
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where the group partnerships function is today. The specifics will be calibrated once you are in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
In the early months, success looks like orientation and early signals. You have mapped the highest-leverage partnership opportunities across the group, formed a view on which corridors and institutional relationships are most underdeveloped relative to their potential, and begun building the relationships that will take six to eighteen months to convert. The business unit leaders know who you are and trust that you are an asset to their commercial ambitions, not a layer above them.
By mid-year, at least one significant group-level partnership is in motion that no single brand could have initiated alone. The government and bilateral relationship pipeline has substance and momentum. The new commercial frontier you have identified as the highest-priority bet has a thesis, an early market test, and a clear path to either scaling or learning from. The team you are building has its first strong hires in place.
Longer term, what you leave behind is a commercial architecture that compounds. The partnerships you have built create recurring revenue that does not require constant reselling. The government relationships you have established make Manifest the default institutional partner in corridors where it currently competes. The new commercial territories you have opened become business units in their own right. The team you have built can operate and grow without you managing every deal.
The direction won't change. The specifics will be calibrated once you are in the role.
What You Bring
You have spent the better part of your career building institutional and government relationships in markets where trust takes years to establish and the deals that result last decades. You understand that the highest-leverage commercial work is rarely visible in a quarterly pipeline report. It is the bilateral framework negotiated with a ministry, the university system partnership that creates a structural enrolment corridor, the government relationship that makes every subsequent commercial conversation easier. You have done this work. You know how long it takes, what it requires, and how to sustain it without losing the commercial urgency that makes it worth doing.
Your market knowledge spans the corridors that matter most for Manifest's next phase: India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the institutional relationships, governments, university systems, multilateral bodies, enterprise employers, that move talent through them. You have operated across these markets not as a visitor but as someone with established presence, real relationships, and a genuine understanding of how decisions get made at the institutional level. You know the difference between a government relationship and a government contact, and you have built the former.
Commercially, you think at the portfolio level. You understand P&L, you have owned one, and you know how to make investment decisions under resource constraints. You can evaluate a partnership opportunity not just on its headline revenue potential but on its strategic leverage: what does this relationship open that it would otherwise take years to build, what does it cost in time and credibility if it goes wrong. You make those trade-offs with the confidence of someone who has made them before and lived with the consequences.
You are a builder by instinct. The ambiguity in this role, no finished playbook, no inherited pipeline, a mandate that is genuinely open at the frontier, does not unsettle you. It is where you do your best work. You have started things from scratch before. You know the difference between the first six months of a build role and the first six months of an optimisation role, and you have chosen the former more than once because that is the kind of work that holds your attention.
You carry yourself at the level of the rooms this role requires. Government ministers, university presidents, enterprise CEOs. You are comfortable in these conversations not because you have rehearsed them but because you have had them. You know how to represent an organisation with conviction and credibility, how to listen for what the institutional partner actually needs rather than what they have asked for, and how to build the kind of trust that makes a large, complex partnership feel inevitable rather than transactional.
Somewhere underneath the commercial instinct, you care about what this infrastructure actually does. The students whose trajectories are shaped by the corridors you open, the families whose generational bets depend on the pathways you build, these are not abstractions to you. You have worked in this space long enough to know the human stakes, and that knowledge informs the seriousness with which you approach the work.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building and your first reaction was not "this is an interesting commercial opportunity." It was "this is the platform I have been waiting to work from." That's the person this role is for.
Why This Is Worth Your Next Decade
There are senior commercial roles that give you a market, a team, and a target. This is not one of them. The commercial infrastructure Manifest is building, the group-level partnerships, the government frameworks, the new commercial frontiers in workforce and employer mobility, does not yet exist in its full form. The person in this seat is not executing a strategy someone else designed. They are designing it.
That is not a small thing. To sit at the group level of a multi-brand infrastructure platform with $80M raised, a real network across 50+ countries, and a mission that connects directly to some of the most significant macro forces of the next two decades, the worker shortage, the remittance economy, the movement of talent across borders, and to have the mandate to build the institutional commercial layer from the ground up: that combination of scale, ambition, and genuine openness does not come around often.
Equity participation is part of the package for the right candidate.
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 which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, the group partnerships and strategic growth function is the commercial expression of everything Manifest has built. The platform, the data, the school and university network: all of it becomes more valuable when institutional partners, governments, and enterprise employers are structurally connected to it. The VP of Group Partnerships is the person who builds those connections at the level of scale and durability that individual brand commercial teams cannot reach alone. This role does not sit inside the flywheel. It accelerates it from the outside.
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.
