What This Role Is
Taken together, Cialfo and BridgeU reach more high school students navigating university decisions than any other platform in the world. Cialfo works with 2,000+ schools across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and beyond. BridgeU serves international schools across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East. The combined network is the largest K12 counseling platform footprint on the planet.
That network is not fully activated. The schools that should know about these platforms don't all know. The school groups that make technology decisions for hundreds of campuses at once are not all in conversation with us. The students who would benefit most from the guidance these platforms enable are not all being reached. And the brand reputation that should come with operating at this scale is not yet where it needs to be.
This role exists to change that across all three fronts simultaneously.
The Head of Marketing, K12 owns the end-to-end marketing strategy across Cialfo and BridgeU globally. That means institutional marketing to drive new school and school group acquisition, student lead generation to support the placements business, and brand building to establish both platforms as the clear category leaders in global K12 education. It's a broad mandate. It requires someone who thinks commercially, operates at scale, and is genuinely energised by the complexity of running marketing across two distinct brands with different markets and different maturity stages.
You'll report directly to the COO, with eventual transition to a VP of Marketing as the function scales.
What Makes This Role Different
Most senior K12 marketing roles sit inside a single brand with a single audience. This one spans two brands, multiple buyer types, and two fundamentally different marketing challenges running in parallel.
On the institutional side, you're marketing to school leaders, heads of school, and group-level decision-makers who are sceptical of tech vendors and slow to move. On the student side, you're marketing to families and students across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East who are making one of the biggest decisions of their lives, often with limited guidance. These are not the same job. The person who can hold both, build the systems for both, and connect both back to commercial outcomes is rare.
The Manifest ecosystem makes this role different too. Cialfo and BridgeU don't sit in isolation. Explore connects the K12 network to 1,000+ university partners. Kaaiser brings student placement infrastructure across multiple corridors. The marketing function that understands how these pieces connect, and builds campaigns that leverage the full ecosystem rather than just one brand, can offer schools, students, and universities something no standalone platform can match.
The broader overseas education market is contracting. Cialfo and BridgeU are growing within it. This is the right moment to be building the marketing engine that compounds that advantage.
What You Own
Institutional marketing across Cialfo and BridgeU
- Own the K12 institutional marketing strategy for both brands globally, with clear accountability for new school acquisition, school group penetration, and marketing contribution to sales pipeline
- Build account-based marketing approaches for strategic school groups and enterprise partnerships, with positioning and messaging that works for counsellors, school leaders, and district or group-level stakeholders
- Partner closely with regional sales teams to ensure marketing is generating the right pipeline, not just the most pipeline, and that conversion from marketing-sourced leads reflects quality as much as volume
- Track and optimise marketing contribution to pipeline, conversion rates, and customer acquisition efficiency with the rigour of someone who has done this before and knows what good looks like
- Own the demand generation and lead generation engine for institutional acquisition, from top-of-funnel awareness through to sales-ready pipeline
Student lead generation for the placements business
- Build and scale student acquisition campaigns to support the student placements business across India, Southeast Asia, and other priority geographies
- Drive high-quality student lead generation through digital marketing, partnerships, events, and performance channels, with full-funnel nurturing journeys for students and parents
- Own performance marketing strategy including paid media, SEO, lifecycle marketing, and conversion optimisation, with clear systems for tracking CAC, lead quality, and ROI
- Work closely with placement and counselling teams to ensure the leads marketing generates are the ones the business can convert and serve well
Brand reputation and market leadership
- Strengthen the market positioning and reputation of both Cialfo and BridgeU globally, building the kind of brand authority that makes school leaders pay attention before the sales team calls
- Build thought leadership strategies that reach school leaders, counsellors, and the broader education ecosystem in ways that create genuine credibility, not just visibility
- Lead PR, communications, brand campaigns, executive visibility, customer storytelling, and industry partnerships across both brands
- Drive participation and visibility at major industry conferences and associations, and build the presence that makes both brands the obvious choice when a school group is evaluating its options
AI adoption and content innovation
- Build AI into the marketing team's operating model as a core capability, not an experiment. Use it to accelerate content production, improve personalisation, optimise campaign performance, and scale what the team can do without proportionally scaling headcount
- Advocate for AI adoption across the broader marketing function and model what thoughtful, high-quality AI-assisted marketing looks like in practice
- Go beyond the standard B2B marketing playbook on channels and formats. The combination of Cialfo's and BridgeU's scale creates content and distribution opportunities that most EdTech companies don't have access to. Use them.
Team leadership
- Lead, develop, and hold accountable a marketing team across both brands, building second-line leaders who can own significant parts of the function independently
- Hire well and structure the team for the actual work, not the work a generic marketing team does
- Build a function that the commercial teams across both brands genuinely rely on, not one that produces output in parallel to the business
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where K12 marketing is today across Cialfo and BridgeU. The business will have moved by the time you join. We'll calibrate the specifics together once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
You'll start by building a thorough picture of the current state across both brands, what's working, where the gaps are, what the highest-leverage improvements look like, and where the marketing function is most disconnected from commercial outcome. You'll have a clear view on where to move first.
From there, the function will be measurably more connected to revenue. School acquisition campaigns will be generating better pipeline. Student lead generation will be more efficient and better converting. The brand reputation of both Cialfo and BridgeU will be building in the markets that matter. AI will be embedded in how the team works, not bolted on.
Over time, Cialfo and BridgeU will be recognised as the clear category leaders in global K12 college counseling, the platforms that serious school groups and Ministries of Education choose when they want to get this right. The marketing function will have played a material role in making that true.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You have fifteen or more years in marketing, with at least eight in a senior leadership role. A meaningful part of that has been in B2B SaaS, EdTech, or the international K12 education ecosystem. You've led multi-brand or multi-market marketing functions before and you know what it takes to hold strategic direction and operational execution at the same time without dropping either.
You're commercially serious. You've held P&L accountability for a marketing function, not just managed a budget. You can sit in a business review and speak about marketing's contribution to revenue in terms that a CFO finds credible. You've built demand generation and lead generation engines that contribute measurably to pipeline, and you track conversion rates, CAC, and marketing-sourced revenue with the rigour of someone who has been accountable for those numbers, not just reported on them.
You understand both sides of this mandate. You know how to market to institutional buyers who are slow, sceptical, and need to be convinced rather than sold to. And you know how to market to students and families who are making emotional, high-stakes decisions with limited information. These require completely different approaches and you've built both.
You're genuinely open about AI. You've used it seriously in a marketing context, you have a clear view of 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, not just enthusiasm.
You think beyond the standard B2B playbook. You bring genuine growth marketing instincts — you've tested acquisition models, channels, and distribution approaches that most teams in your space hadn't tried, and you have real examples of what worked and what didn't.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Cialfo and BridgeU are building together and thought: this is the largest K12 counseling network in the world, and I know how to build the marketing function it deserves. 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. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, K12 is where the Manifest flywheel starts. The schools that adopt Cialfo and BridgeU bring more students, more data, and better outcomes into the ecosystem. The marketing function that drives that school acquisition is not a support function for the sales team. It's the top of everything. The person who builds that function well, across the world's largest K12 counseling network, is doing some of the most consequential marketing work in the group.
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
