Associate Director, Partner & University Relationships

About this role

What This Role Is

Every year, millions of students leave home to study somewhere else. For most of them, it is the most consequential decision they will ever make - the one that decides which country they will build a life in, what work they will do, who their children will grow up alongside. And almost none of them make that decision alone. They make it through a network. A counselor who understood their profile. A trusted partner organisation that knew their family and their context. A university representative who built enough confidence in that partner to be the first call when a strong candidate came through.

The quality of that network is what determines whether a student lands in the right place or somewhere close enough that they convince themselves it was right. It decides whether the institution gets the student who will thrive there, or the student who will quietly underperform for four years. Multiplied across hundreds of thousands of students, the network is not a back-office function - it is the infrastructure that decides where global talent goes.

Cialfo and BridgeU sits at the centre of that network. Used by 2,000+ schools globally, Cialfo's platform gives counselors and students the tools to navigate the university search and application process with clarity. The partner ecosystem and university relationships that sit around that platform are what convert reach into real student outcomes at scale - applications submitted, offers received, students enrolled, lives redirected.

Right now, both of those channels - the partner network and the university relationships - work. The question is whether they work as well as they could, whether they are structured for the volume that is coming, and whether the commercial architecture around them is built for long-term value or short-term throughput. That is what this role exists to answer.

The Associate Director, Partner & University Relationships owns both channels as a single global growth system. On the partner side: the network of placement and counseling partners across all key study destinations — who is in it, how they are performing, what the commercial terms look like, and where the next growth comes from. On the university side: the relationships with university representatives, built toward a model that scales globally. You will sit at the intersection of external relationships and internal execution - close enough to the operations and counseling teams to know when the partner experience is creating friction, and senior enough to fix it.

What Makes This Role Different

Most partnership roles in international education own one channel or the other - either the partner network or the university relationships. This one owns both, deliberately, because the compounding effect between them is the point.

More universities partnering with our group across more destinations makes the partner network more productive in every market - partners can offer students more options, and they can do it with the confidence that our institutional relationships will support the application. More partner volume across more source countries gives universities better proof of what the Cialfo and BridgeU relationship is worth - real applications from real students with real outcomes. Better data across both sides means smarter matching, higher conversion, and a partnership ecosystem that gets harder to replicate every cycle.

There is a version of this role at almost every player in the industry. Most of them are channel management jobs - quarterly check-ins, commission disputes, the occasional partner trip. This is not that role. This is the role for the person who has done the channel management job well enough to know exactly what is broken about how the industry runs it, and wants to build the version that replaces it.

Cialfo and BridgeU sit inside Manifest Global - a group that also operates Explore, trusted by 1,000+ universities across 100+ countries, and Kaaiser, a trusted name in student placements since 1997. That group context changes what you can offer both partners and universities - you are not representing a standalone platform, you are part of an ecosystem with reach, data, and institutional relationships that no independent operator in this space can match.

What You Own

The global…