Cialfo
Website:
cialfo.co
Job details:
The Opportunity
This is an executive business leadership role.
We are looking for a Vice President, Global Growth and Marketing to architect one of Manifest Global's core operating systems — the commercial growth engine that connects strategy, product, brand, sales, customer success, partnerships, AI, and marketing into one integrated capability that accelerates the performance of the entire organisation.
Working closely with the CEO, COO, and Business Leaders, you will help determine where we grow, how we compete, where we invest, how our portfolio evolves, and how Growth and Marketing create measurable enterprise value.
You will inherit strong brands, talented people, and significant market opportunity, but you will not inherit a finished global organisation. Your first year will be about building from zero to one. You will design the operating system, establish common standards, build shared capabilities, create commercial discipline, embed AI into everyday execution, and earn organisational trust by demonstrating measurable business impact. We are looking for a builder who enjoys creating clarity where none exists, designing systems before optimising them, and laying foundations that will scale globally over the coming decade.
Your Executive Mandate
As a member of the executive leadership team, your responsibility extends far beyond leading the marketing function. You will help shape company strategy, portfolio strategy, commercial priorities, market expansion, product direction, investment decisions, annual planning, organisational design, AI transformation, strategic partnerships, and the integration of future acquisitions where appropriate. Growth and Marketing will not simply support these conversations — they will actively shape them.
Your mandate is to build a single global Growth and Marketing operating system that creates leverage across every company within the Manifest portfolio while preserving the strengths and identities of each individual business. You will create alignment in strategy, planning, execution, governance, measurement, operating rhythms, and resource allocation so that every team benefits from shared capabilities while remaining deeply connected to its customers and markets.
You will build one commercial growth engine where brand, product marketing, demand generation, content, events, partnerships, customer marketing, lifecycle marketing, marketing operations, and sales enablement function as one integrated system. Growth and Marketing should influence every stage of the customer journey, from shaping market perception and generating demand to increasing customer lifetime value and strengthening long-term customer relationships.
You will continuously evolve how the various brands at Manifest Global work together as an ecosystem. You will identify opportunities for shared positioning, ecosystem storytelling, cross-selling, portfolio leverage, and common capabilities that enable every business to become stronger because it belongs to Manifest.
You will establish one global brand architecture while simultaneously building sophisticated commercial intelligence capabilities that allow Growth and Marketing to understand business performance with the same rigour that Finance understands financial performance. Attribution, forecasting, experimentation, customer insight, investment analysis, and performance measurement should become strategic capabilities that influence executive decision-making across the company.
You will also lead the transformation of our organisation into one of the world's most AI-enabled commercial functions, embedding AI across research, customer intelligence, creative development, content production, campaign execution, localisation, analytics, reporting, workflow automation, and operational excellence. Technology should multiply the capability of exceptional people, allowing the organisation to operate with greater speed, quality, and strategic focus.
Above all, you will build a world-class organisation. You will develop exceptional leaders, create clarity and accountability, raise standards relentlessly, simplify complexity, and establish an environment where ambitious marketers and growth leaders come to do the best work of their careers.
Commercial Accountability
Growth and Marketing exist to create enterprise value. Success will not be measured by campaigns, impressions, or activity alone, but by meaningful contribution to profitable revenue growth, customer acquisition, customer expansion, retention, market leadership, brand equity, commercial efficiency, marketing return on investment, EBITDA, and long-term enterprise value. Every investment should have a clear commercial rationale, every initiative should strengthen our competitive position, and every member of the organisation should understand how their work contributes directly to the success of the business.
What Success Looks Like
In the first 12 months
Within your first year, you will have built the foundations of a truly global Growth and Marketing organisation from the ground up. You will have designed and implemented a common operating system across the Manifest portfolio, established shared ways of working, introduced commercial measurement frameworks, embedded AI into everyday execution, and built trusted partnerships with every Business Leader. You will have transformed a collection of capable marketing teams into one aligned global leadership organisation with shared goals, shared standards, and shared accountability. Sales, Product, Customer Success, and every Business Leader will recognise Growth and Marketing as a strategic commercial partner rather than a support function, and executive decisions will increasingly be informed by customer insight, commercial intelligence, and marketing performance. Most importantly, you will have demonstrated that Growth and Marketing directly influence revenue, profitability, and enterprise value — earning credibility not through presentations or strategy documents but through execution and measurable business outcomes.
Over time
Growth and Marketing become one of Manifest Global's defining competitive advantages. The organisation consistently drives profitable growth across every business. Our brands become recognised globally as the most trusted ecosystem in international education. Our shared capabilities create meaningful leverage across the portfolio. Our commercial decisions become increasingly informed by customer insight, market intelligence, and sophisticated performance measurement. Growth and Marketing earn their place alongside Product, Finance, and Operations as one of the company's primary strategic functions — attracting exceptional talent and becoming a benchmark for excellence within the global education sector.
Who You Are
You are a business leader first and a growth builder second. You understand that Growth and Marketing exist to create enterprise value, not simply campaigns. You naturally think in systems rather than functions, enjoy solving business problems as much as marketing challenges, and combine creativity with commercial discipline. You are equally comfortable thinking like an executive and operating like a builder. You can define long-term strategy in the morning, review a campaign, challenge a positioning statement, redesign an operating cadence, or coach a team in the afternoon, and finish the day discussing commercial performance with the executive team. You are not precious about hierarchy or titles because you understand that exceptional organisations are built by leaders who are willing to fly high when strategic thinking is required and fly low when execution demands it. You thrive in ambiguity, enjoy building from zero to one, raise standards without creating bureaucracy, earn trust through execution, and build organisations that continue creating value long after individual initiatives are complete.
Your Experience
We are interested in the scale of the problems you have solved. You have likely built and led global marketing or growth organisations within high-growth technology, SaaS, platform, marketplace, or multi-brand businesses, partnered closely with COOs, Boards, and executive leadership teams on company strategy, and built commercial growth engines that have materially influenced revenue, profitability, and enterprise value. You have successfully led functions spanning brand, product marketing, communications, demand generation, content, marketing operations, and commercial enablement while developing exceptional leaders capable of scaling alongside the business. Most importantly, you have built organisations before. You know what it takes to move from zero to one, and you enjoy building as much as operating.
Manifest is one of the few organisations that serves both institutions and individuals at scale. Success in this role requires an equal appreciation for enterprise sales cycles and consumer behaviour. You should be as comfortable building trust with a university Vice Chancellor as you are understanding what inspires a student to choose a destination, what reassures a parent making a life-changing investment, and how consumer brands earn attention, trust, and advocacy over time.
You have built at least one global brand. You have led both B2B and B2C marketing. You know enterprise sales and consumer psychology. You have built functions from zero to one and transformed organisations along the way. You have managed multi-country teams, have marketplace or ecosystem experience, understand AI deeply, and are commercially obsessive. You can partner with a COO. You love execution.
Why Join Manifest Global
Manifest Global stands at an inflection point. The brands are established. The products are proven. The markets are global. The opportunity is no longer to build another successful marketing department — it is to build one of the defining commercial growth organisations in global education.
If you are excited by creating something that does not yet exist, if you enjoy building as much as leading, if you are equally energised by shaping strategy and executing the details, and if you want your work to influence the trajectory of an entire global education ecosystem, we would love to meet you.
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.
Click on Apply to know more.