Workplace Manager

What This Role Is

Manifest's Delhi presence has outgrown the space built for it. Teams are already working past the office's comfortable capacity, spread across multiple locations that were never meant to be a permanent arrangement. None of this is a crisis, it's what happens when a company grows faster than its physical footprint, and it's exactly the moment where the right person in this role stops being optional.

Delhi isn't just another office in Manifest's portfolio. It's the seat of leadership presence for the India operation, the hub where teams across functions actually sit together, and the place counselors, schools, partners, and colleagues from other Manifest markets walk into when they want to know who Manifest really is. Every one of those visits is a moment where the space either backs up what Manifest says about itself or quietly undercuts it.

This role owns that experience end to end: the daily rhythm of the office, the moment a global colleague or client walks through the door, and the active work of consolidating fragmented locations into something coherent as the team grows into it. You lead the team that makes all of this happen, not just the space itself.

You own making Manifest's Delhi offices feel like the front door to the company, for the people who work there every day and the people who visit once and need to leave convinced.

What Makes This Role Different

Most workplace roles ask you to maintain something that's already finished, on a schedule that rarely changes. This one hands you a real, funded expansion still being decided, a team to build and lead, and a visitor experience that has to hold up for people who are seeing Manifest for the first time, sometimes from another country entirely. Few workplace hires get to shape all three at once, while the daily operation never stops running underneath them.

This isn't a nine-to-six role, and it shouldn't be sold as one. Things break outside office hours, visitors arrive on tight schedules, and a consolidation project doesn't pause for the weekend. The person who thrives here is energized by being the one who's reachable, not someone counting down to being off the clock.

What You Own

Day-to-Day Office Experience

• Own how it feels to walk into a Manifest office in Delhi every day, and set the standard for what's stocked, maintained, and fixed before someone has to ask
• Be the first call when something breaks or goes wrong, in or out of standard hours, and be fast enough that people trust you'll handle it
• Own workplace safety and compliance as a baseline that never slips, even as the space itself keeps changing

Visitor, Client, and Global Colleague Experience

• Own the experience of every external visitor and every colleague from another Manifest market who walks through the Delhi office, from the first message about their visit to the moment they leave
• Design a hosting standard that makes Delhi feel like a genuine front door to Manifest, not a stop on someone's itinerary
• Anticipate what a visiting counselor, client, or global teammate needs before they have to ask for it

Team Leadership

• Hire, coach, and lead the office personnel team responsible for keeping Delhi running, and hold them to the same standard of speed and care you bring yourself
• Build a team that can be trusted to make good calls without escalating everything to you, while still knowing exactly when something does need you
• Create the kind of team culture where being hands-on and responsive is a shared standard, not just your personal habit

The Expansion and Consolidation Project

• Own the workplace side of consolidating fragmented office locations into a coherent, unified space as the India team grows
• Partner directly on space planning, layout, and build-out decisions as a real voice in shaping them, not as someone informed after the fact
• Manage the disruption of a live office project without letting daily operations or visitor experience feel the difference

Vendor, Budget, and Cross-Functional Partnership

• Own vendor relationships and negotiate contracts that protect Manifest's interests as the footprint grows
• Manage the workplace budget with real financial discipline, treating it as a resource to use well, not just spend
• Be the connective tissue between Talent, IT, Finance, and brand leaders who all depend on the workplace working, bringing data and firsthand observation to the case for what it needs

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where the Delhi offices are today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

In the first weeks, you've walked every Delhi location, met the team you're inheriting or building, and formed a real point of view on what's working, what's fragile, and what the expansion needs to get right.

By mid-period, the daily experience of Manifest's Delhi offices is visibly better, visitors and global colleagues leave with a strong impression, and your team is operating with real ownership rather than waiting on direction.

In the long term, Delhi's offices function the way the rest of Manifest's ambition suggests they should, coherent, well-hosted, and built to hold the next phase of growth instead of straining against it.

The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You've run a workplace or office function before, and you've led a team doing it, not just executed solo. You know the difference between keeping a space clean and actually managing an experience, and you think in projects, comfortable holding a vendor negotiation, a visitor's arrival, and a same-day fix for something broken in the same afternoon.

You're genuinely hands-on. You'd rather fix the problem yourself than write a ticket about it, and you don't wait for permission to act when something needs handling now. Being reachable outside standard hours doesn't drain you, it's part of what makes you good at this.

You communicate well across people who don't share a common language for the same problem, an IT lead, a visiting client, a teammate flying in from another market, and you can host or coordinate all of them without losing your footing.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Delhi is becoming for Manifest and your first reaction was not "that sounds like a lot of moving pieces," it was "I want to be the person who makes all of those pieces, and the people running them, work together." 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 150+ 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. $91M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically: Delhi is where Manifest's India ambition either becomes real or stays a plan on paper, for the people who work there and the people who visit once and form their whole impression of the company from that single trip. This role decides which one it is.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 150+ countries.