--- title: 'Program Manager at Cialfo' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-cialfo-delhi-74mqya0ecev7' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-06' --- # Program Manager at Cialfo - **Company:** Cialfo - **Location:** Delhi, India - **Posted:** 2026-07-31 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06 - **Apply:** http://www.cialfo.co/careers?gh_jid=6131693004 ## Job description 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. The problem is not that any single team is failing. It's that the highest-leverage work in a business like this doesn't live inside one function - it lives in the transformation and optimization projects that cut across Tech, Product, Marketing, and Operations, and someone needs to own them end to end. A funnel improvement that Marketing wants tested needs Product to build it and Tech to ship it. A new process that could remove a structural inefficiency needs someone to design it, prove it, and hand it off cleanly. Right now, that ownership happens informally, project by project, and the work that would compound doesn't get the sustained, disciplined execution it needs. This is where this role sits. You will run multiple 'Strategize - Build - Operate - Transfer' projects a year - some of them genuinely 0-1 (new ideas that need user research, market research, and hypothesis testing before anyone knows if they work), some of them optimization projects on things that already exist but need better process design and a new benchmark for what good looks like. You will also be asked to take on whatever else is critical for the business to win, even when it doesn't have a job title yet. You will own full-cycle delivery for these projects - from framing the problem with the right stakeholders, through build and testing, to launch, operating it long enough to prove it works, and transferring it cleanly to whoever owns it long-term. You are the person who makes sure a project doesn't just get discussed. It gets shipped, it gets proven, and it gets handed off in a state someone else can run with. 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. The Manifest ecosystem gives this role real range: some projects will be genuinely 0-1 - a new idea nobody has tested yet - and others will be 1-100 - scaling something that already works but is starting to strain under its own complexity. Few program roles at this stage give you exposure to both ends of that spectrum in the same year. This is a build role, not a maintenance one. There is no finished playbook for how these projects should run - you're expected to design the frameworks, set the benchmarks, and prove through disciplined experimentation what should scale and what shouldn't. ## 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. ## About Cialfo ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Cialfo provides an AI-powered college counseling and application platform that connects students, counselors, and universities to streamline the higher education admission process. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B extended to $60M total funding) - **Headquarters**: Singapore, Singapore - **Founded**: 2017 (company roots trace back to 2010 as an offline consultancy) - **Founders**: Rohan Pasari (CEO), Stanley Chia (COO), William James Hund (CPO) ## Core Business - Primary industry/industries: Educational Technology (EdTech), Higher Education - Target customers: B2B — K-12 schools and universities, with end-users being high school students, school counselors, and university admissions teams - Mission statement: "To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education" ## Products & Services - **Cialfo Platform**: An all-in-one AI-powered college counseling workflow platform for K-12 schools. Integrates with UCAS, Common App, and Parchment to help counselors manage student applications, track progress, and streamline operations. - **Direct Apply**: A proprietary technology that lets students use a single application form to apply to 75,000+ programs across 1,000+ universities globally. - **Explore by Cialfo**: A product launched in 2025 for universities to reach and engage with prospective students worldwide. - **Profile Builder & University Exploration**: Student-facing tools that help learners make informed decisions about college and career paths. - **Online University Fair**: A virtual event platform launched during COVID-19, which connected 18,000+ students across 128 countries with 95 universities. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed (last known round details below) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $60M (Series B of $40M in 2022 led by Square Peg and SEEK Investments, plus a $20M extension led by Tiger Global in the same year). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Square Peg, SEEK Investments, Tiger Global, SIG Global, Vulcan Capital, DLF Venture, SEEDS Capital, Cercano Management, January Capital, Alto Partners, Lim Teck Lee, Govin Capital, Koh Boon Hwee. - **Growth Signals**: Recognized as one of the "World’s Top EdTech Companies (2024)" by TIME and Statista; named a finalist for "Digital Innovation of the Year" at the PIEoneer Awards 2024; certified as a "Great Place to Work" in both India and Singapore; operates in 100+ international markets; over 100 years of combined team experience; official technology partner of the 2024 IC3 Regional Forums. ## Competitive Advantages - **Integrated Ecosystem**: Partnerships with major platforms (UCAS, Common App, Parchment) and a proprietary Direct Apply system for 75,000+ programs create a deep moat against point-solution competitors. - **99.99% Platform Uptime**: Built on AWS infrastructure, ensuring reliability during peak admissions seasons — a critical trust factor for schools. - **AI-Powered Workflows**: Reduces administrative burden on counselors with dynamic reporting, automated application prep, and instant live chat support (7-second response time, 100% issue resolution). - **Global Reach**: Presence in 100+ markets with teams in Singapore, India, China, and the US, giving them unique cross-cultural insight into the admissions landscape. - **High Customer Satisfaction**: 96% counselor satisfaction rate with contracts spanning 7+ years, signaling strong retention. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale to 100 Million Students**: Ambitious goal to make higher education accessible at an unprecedented volume through AI-driven solutions. - **Product Expansion**: Recent launch of "Explore by Cialfo" for universities, broadening their product suite beyond K-12. - **Deepen AI Integration**: The company is "reshaping the higher education landscape" with cutting-edge AI, meaning investment in machine learning and automation is likely a core engineering focus. - **Global Footprint Growth**: With offices in Singapore (HQ), New Delhi, Shanghai, and Washington DC, the company is building infrastructure to serve a truly international customer base. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Diversity**: Strong emphasis on DEI; 53% of the workforce is women. The careers page explicitly states "Inclusion Isn’t an Initiative — It’s Who We Are." - **Mission-Driven**: Work directly impacts global education access — a compelling purpose for many job seekers. - **Award-Winning Workplace**: Certified "Great Place to Work" in both India and Singapore. Recognized on HolonIQ’s list of 50 most promising EdTech startups in Southeast Asia. - **Engineering Environment**: Focus on scalable, reliable technology (99.99% uptime, AWS infrastructure) that "powers global student success." The engineering culture appears mature and product-focused. - **Growth Trajectory**: With $60M in Series B funding, a growing global team, and recent product launches, the company is in an expansion phase offering career growth opportunities. - **Remote/Office Policy**: Not explicitly disclosed, but the presence of multiple global offices (Singapore, New Delhi, Shanghai, Washington DC) suggests a hybrid or flexible model, especially given the international nature of their team and customers. ## Sources 1. [Cialfo Website](https://www.cialfo.co/) 2. [Cialfo About Us](https://www.cialfo.co/about-us) 3. [Cialfo Our Story](https://www.cialfo.co/our-story) 4. [Cialfo Our Team](https://www.cialfo.co/our-team) 5. [Cialfo Careers](https://www.cialfo.co/careers) ## Other roles at Cialfo - [Admission Intern / Consultant (Study Abroad)](https://feeny.ai/job/admission-intern-consultant-study-abroad-cialfo-india-t18rvw7s3ch2) — India - [Senior Talent Operations Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-talent-operations-specialist-cialfo-delhi-p5crf3404bqq) — Delhi, India - [Workplace Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/workplace-manager-cialfo-delhi-h3mf83nwk2e3) — Delhi, India - [Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-talent-acquisition-specialist-cialfo-delhi-fgnhhwgjr9fh) — Delhi, India - [Head of Talent](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-cialfo-delhi-ptmaw1crqzra) — Delhi, India - [Client Partner, K12 - Cialfo](https://feeny.ai/job/client-partner-k12-cialfo-cialfo-india-m4hfy9b2j2zh) — India - [Client Partner, Cialfo](https://feeny.ai/job/client-partner-cialfo-cialfo-hanoi-54x4jjntms9v) — Hanoi, Vietnam - [Vice President, Global Growth and Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/vice-president-global-growth-and-marketing-cialfo-delhi-11dgtegq8mp0) — Delhi, India - [Vice President, Global Growth and Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/vice-president-global-growth-and-marketing-cialfo-singapore-mxn0t032jp7x) — Singapore - [Pre Counselling Advisor](https://feeny.ai/job/pre-counselling-advisor-cialfo-delhi-av009nkmej3e) — Delhi, India