Program Manager

Manifest Global; Delhi; Presencial; INR 1 800 000 - 3 000 000; Tempo integral

Resumo da oferta

Manifest Global seeks a strategic Program Manager to lead transformation initiatives across Tech, Product, Marketing, and Operations. You will own projects from strategy through to handoff, ensuring value and adoption within the organization.

You thrive in ambiguous environments, turning early-stage ideas into scalable programs while maintaining accountability and clear executive alignment across teams.

Qualificações

• 5–8 years building things in high-growth environments.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and move from unclear briefs to workable plans.
• Proven track record turning strategic ideas into executable projects across multiple functions.

Responsabilidades

• Translate business problems into SBOT-aligned project plans across Tech, Product, Marketing and Operations.
• Own end-to-end project lifecycle: scoping, alignment, build, launch and post-launch review.
• Lead 0-1 initiatives and optimization projects with measurable impact.
• Drive cross-functional execution with influence and clear decision-making.

Conhecimentos

Program management

Cross-functional leadership

Ambiguity management

Stakeholder management

Experimentation

Descrição da oferta de emprego

Manifest Global empowers in building companies that connect the world towards growth, prosperity, and innovation. Our portfolio includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, Kaaiser, EduGo, and Flow AI and which are dedicated to expanding global student mobility by serving their respective stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Our Mission

To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education through our world-class network of portfolio brands; a network that globally connects community stakeholders that provide the finest resources and support material, anywhere in the world and at any time.

What This Role Is

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across India decide they want to study abroad. Some come through K12 school partnerships, some find their way in directly. Either way, they enter a journey - discovery, counseling, application, offer, enrollment - that runs through dozens of handoffs between people, platforms, and teams. When that journey works, a student ends up at a university that fits their budget, their course, and their ambitions, and the business realizes revenue at the moment they enroll. When it doesn't, applications stall, deadlines slip, and a student who could have enrolled goes quiet.

What Makes This Role Different

Most program management roles ask you to track a roadmap someone else designed. This one asks you to build the roadmap itself - deciding what the next transformation or optimization project should even be, then owning it across three or four functions that don't naturally report to the same person. The Strategize-Build-Operate-Transfer model means you don't hand a project off the moment it launches; you stay accountable until it's actually working and someone else can run it without you.

What You Own

Transformation projects (Strategize - Build - Operate - Transfer)

• Translate a business problem into a project plan that Tech, Product, Marketing and Business teams can actually execute against
• Own the full lifecycle of assigned projects - scoping, stakeholder alignment, build, testing, launch, and post-launch review
• Own multiple SBOT-cycle projects a year, end to end, from initial strategy through a clean operational handoff
• Define what "operate" looks like well enough to prove a project works before transferring ownership
• Ensure nothing gets handed off half-finished - the transfer is only complete when the receiving team can run it without you

0-1 initiatives

• Lead user research, market research, and hypothesis testing on new ideas before committing resources to build them
• Design and run experiments that give a clear read on whether an idea is worth scaling
• Turn ambiguous, early-stage problems into a testable plan within weeks, not quarters

Optimization and process design

• Identify structural inefficiencies across the business and turn them into scoped optimization projects
• Build the frameworks and process designs that make a function run better, not just faster
• Set new benchmarks for what "good" looks like once a process has been redesigned

Cross-functional execution and influence

• Be the connective layer between Tech, Product, Marketing, and Operations so a project doesn't stall in the gap between roadmaps
• Lead cross-functional execution through credibility, influence, and clear decision-making rather than formal authority
• Take on whatever else is critical for the business to win, even without a predefined mandate

What Success Looks Like

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

In your first weeks, you're not shipping yet - you're building a working map of how projects actually move through Tech, Product, and Marketing today, and forming a point of view on where the highest-leverage transformation or optimization opportunities sit. You'll know you're on track when stakeholders start coming to you before a project stalls, not after.

By the middle of your first year, you've run at least one full SBOT cycle from strategy to clean handoff, and the people around you trust that if you've said something will happen, it will. You've proven, through real experiments rather than opinion, which 0-1 ideas are worth scaling and which aren't.

Longer term, the way the business runs cross-functional projects looks different because you built it that way - frameworks that outlast the specific projects they were built for, a track record of transformations that actually stuck, and a reputation as the person who gets called in when something critical and undefined needs to happen.

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

What You Bring

You've spent five to eight years building things inside high-growth environments, and you've likely seen both ends of that growth curve - the 0-1 phase, where the job is rapid experimentation, hypothesis testing, and getting an MVP in front of real users, and the 1-100 phase, where the job becomes process design and managing the complexity that scale creates. You know which mode a problem calls for and you don't try to apply 1-100 rigor to a 0-1 problem, or vice versa.

You have real comfort operating in ambiguity, and more than that, you're fast at moving from ambiguity to clarity - you ask the right question early, you don't wait for someone to hand you a clean brief, and you get to a workable answer quickly rather than a perfect one slowly.

You think in first principles. When a process is broken, you don't default to the existing framework - you rebuild the logic from the ground up and design something better, then prove it works before asking anyone to trust it.

Most importantly, you read the description of what this role is building and your first reaction was not "this sounds like a coordination job." It was "this is exactly the kind of ambiguous, high-leverage problem I want to be handed." 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 which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

Student Placements is where that infrastructure meets an individual student's decision - and the transformation and optimization work this role owns is what makes that infrastructure work better at every scale it operates at.

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