Director of University Relationships

What This Role Is

The India-to-Australia student corridor is one of the largest legal human migration flows on earth. Every year, tens of thousands of young Indians leave for Australian universities. Behind each one is a family that has taken a decision — often a loan, often a home re-mortgaged, often a generational bet — to move one person across an ocean in the hope that a whole family's trajectory will shift. When it works, it does. A single student placed in Melbourne or Sydney becomes, within a decade, the financial gravity that lifts parents, siblings, cousins, and sometimes an entire neighbourhood.

The counselor a family trusts with that decision is not doing a transaction. They are redirecting a life.

On the other end of that corridor, in an international office in Sydney or Melbourne, a Pro-Vice-Chancellor is looking at a market that has shifted under her feet. Visa policy has tightened. Half her agent network is consolidating or closing. Her enrolment targets have not moved, but the infrastructure she relied on to hit them has. She needs fewer partners. She needs deeper ones. She needs someone who understands both her university's next decade and the Indian family living rooms where those decisions actually get made. That person does not exist in most counseling agencies. The question is whether Kaaiser becomes the one that sends them.

Kaaiser has been the trusted name in India since 1997. Not because of marketing. Because of outcomes. Because of relationships built over decades with Australian universities that know Kaaiser delivers the right student to the right programme, and does it at volume. That credibility is real. The question now is what we build on top of it — and what it becomes once it plugs into something larger.

You are not a relationship manager. You are Kaaiser's most senior strategic voice with Australian universities — the person who shapes how those partnerships are structured, what they are worth, and where they go over the next five years. You will own the portfolio end to end: from the commission conversation to the multi-year roadmap, from strategic co-creation with a vice-chancellor's international office to operational delivery in the student markets. You will define what the India-Australia corridor looks like for the next decade.

Why This Matters Beyond Kaaiser

Manifest Global — the group Kaaiser is part of — is building the operating system for global human capital mobility. The thesis is straightforward and large.

By 2030, developed economies will be short 85 million workers. Emerging economies will have hundreds of millions of young people looking for pathways into education and work that their domestic systems cannot provide. $700 billion flows back every year in remittances from people who have already made that crossing — more than every aid budget on earth combined. Education is the front door to that migration. Most of that $700B starts with someone, somewhere, deciding where a student should go to university.

Right now, the infrastructure connecting those two sides is broken. Fragmented agents. Opaque university relationships. Families navigating the single largest decision of their lives through whatever counselor happened to be in their neighbourhood. Manifest is building the system that replaces that — Cialfo for the 2,000+ schools where the decision begins, BridgeU for international schools globally, Explore for the 1,000+ universities on the other side, and Kaaiser for the counseling relationships that actually carry a family across the line in one of the largest corridors on the planet.

This role sits at the thickest part of that pipe. The India-Australia corridor is one of the highest-volume student flows in the world, and Kaaiser is one of its most trusted operators. What you build here is not a partnership portfolio. It is a load-bearing wall in the infrastructure Manifest is putting up. Done right, it becomes the template for how every major student corridor gets restructured over the next decade.

Why This Is Worth Your Next Decade

Most senior roles in international education are jobs. This one is a bet — on an industry that is being structurally rebuilt, on a company positioned to rebuild it, and on a corridor that sits at the center of the largest human capital flow on the planet.

The thesis is simple. Moving talent across borders is the most capital-efficient poverty reduction mechanism available — more efficient than aid, more durable than trade, more compounding than any domestic intervention. Every student Kaaiser places well is a node in that system. Do it badly and a family loses a generation of savings. Do it well and a family's economic trajectory changes permanently, and a university gets the student they actually needed, and a destination economy gets the talent it cannot produce on its own. Multiply that by 150,000 a year, across decades, across corridors, and you have a thesis worth building a career around.

Think about who you become on the other side of this. Five years from now, the person who took this role and did it right is not someone with a bigger title. They are the person university vice-chancellors call before they redesign their global strategy. They are the operator other counseling leaders reference when they describe how modern university partnerships are supposed to work. They have built something that did not exist before they arrived — a corridor, structured properly, running at a scale that moved the needle on one of the largest human capital flows of their generation. That is a life, not a resume line.

You would be joining at the inflection point — in Kaaiser's history, in the international education market, and in Manifest's build-out. Kaaiser is growing because 30 years of brand credibility is a moat newer entrants cannot replicate, and because plugging into Manifest's technology and data infrastructure gives Kaaiser capabilities standalone agencies simply do not have. The person who shapes the Australian university partnership model for the next decade will do so from this seat.

This role offers real commercial ownership, direct visibility with Kaaiser and Manifest leadership, and the ability to shape strategy — not execute someone else's. Equity participation is part of the package for the right candidate. $80M raised. Still early. The shape of the thing is being decided right now, by the people who show up.

Show up.

What Makes This Role Different

Most university partnership roles at this level are account management with a senior title. You inherit a book of relationships, you protect them, you report upward. This one is not that.

No standalone counseling agency in India — or anywhere — can walk into a university conversation with Cialfo and BridgeU's school network, Explore's outreach infrastructure, and a 30-year track record in the corridor sitting behind them. You can. That changes what you are able to offer, what you are able to negotiate, and what a long-term partnership with Kaaiser can genuinely mean for a university that is thinking about its next decade of international recruitment strategy — not just its next intake cycle.

Most people in international education today are working inside the old model: agents, commissions, volume. You would be building the new one. The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Kaaiser is growing inside it. This is the moment to build partnerships structured for the market that is coming, not the one that has passed. The person who does this will have shaped not just Kaaiser's Australian portfolio, but what the next generation of university-counselor-student infrastructure looks like — globally.

What You Own

The Australian university portfolio

• Own end-to-end relationships with Kaaiser's key Australian university partners — primary senior point of contact for international offices, leadership teams, and decision-makers at both operational and strategic levels
• Define what each partnership is worth, what it should be worth, and build the plan to close the gap — commission structures, contract terms, preferred partner status, long-term roadmaps
• Ensure Kaaiser is seen as a strategic priority by the universities that matter most, not as one channel among many

Commercial and contract ownership

• Lead all contract negotiations and renewals, structuring agreements for long-term advantage — not just the current cycle
• Assess partnership ROI across the portfolio regularly and recalibrate where value is misaligned — protecting margin, improving economics, exiting relationships that are not performing
• Secure improved commercial terms as a measurable outcome, not as a byproduct of good relationships

Manifest ecosystem leverage

• Use the full Manifest portfolio — Cialfo's school network, Explore's university outreach infrastructure, BridgeU's international school reach — to offer university partners something no standalone agency can offer: a full-funnel, data-informed student pipeline
• Identify and lead integration opportunities that deepen institutional engagement and create new commercial agreements beyond the traditional recruitment model
• Position Kaaiser not as a recruitment channel but as a strategic partner in a university's long-term international enrolment strategy

Long-term partnership strategy

• Develop multi-year partnership strategies with key universities — new programmes, new student segments, co-branded initiatives, and market penetration opportunities
• Act as Kaaiser's internal authority on Australian university market dynamics, policy shifts, and competitive positioning — the person the leadership team goes to when they need to understand what is changing and why
• Translate partner feedback into operational improvements and growth opportunities across sales, ops, and marketing

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Kaaiser is today. By the time you join, the business will have moved — new partnerships in progress, new priorities surfaced, new targets set. We will define the specifics together once you are in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

That said, the shape of success in this role is clear.

You will start by building a complete picture — what each Australian university partnership is actually worth, where the gaps are, and where the immediate opportunities sit. You will have met the people who matter on the university side and you will know what they need from Kaaiser right now. You will have a point of view on where to move first.

From there, something will have materially improved. A commercial conversation will be in progress that wasn't before you arrived. A partnership will be deeper, better structured, or heading toward a longer-term agreement. The Manifest ecosystem — Cialfo, Explore, BridgeU — will be part of university conversations in a way it wasn't previously.

Over time, the portfolio will look different from how you found it. Not maintained — shaped. The universities that matter most to Kaaiser will see the relationship differently. The commercial terms and partnership structures will reflect that. And there will be a clear view of what the next three years look like for each key partner.

The specifics will be calibrated once you are in the role. The direction will remain the same.

What You Bring

You have spent the better part of your career in international education, and you know the India-Australia corridor in a way that is earned, not learned from a brief. You have sat across the table from a university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor International and understood what they actually needed — not what was on the agenda, but what would make the relationship worth continuing. You have restructured a commercial agreement that was working well enough and made it work significantly better. You have built something — a partnership, a framework, a portfolio — that did not exist before you arrived.

You are commercially hungry in the specific sense that matters here: you are not satisfied with a relationship that is functional. You want to know what it could be worth, and you want to build the case to get there. You understand that the best partnerships in this industry are not maintained — they are actively shaped, year by year, by someone who understands both sides of the table.

You are comfortable with ambiguity. Kaaiser is in a period of change — the market is shifting, the group is growing, and the partnership model is being actively redesigned. There is no playbook for what this role becomes in year two and year three. You will write it.

You will be operating with significant autonomy from Delhi, representing Kaaiser with institutions in Australia, coordinating internally with a group that spans Singapore, London, and beyond. That requires someone who is self-directed, structured, and trusted — not someone who needs a manager to define the next move.

Most importantly: you read the description of what Kaaiser is building and your first reaction was not "this is a good job." It was something closer to — someone has to build this properly. Someone has to sit across from vice-chancellors and structure these partnerships for what they actually are — the front door of one of the largest human capital flows on earth. It might as well be me. That is the person this role is for.

Kaaiser is part of Manifest Global — a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 150+ countries.