Operations Lead (Student Success)

Operations Lead (Student Success)

The Short Version

Who we’re looking for: We’re looking for a leader who is a people-first operations leader and deeply cares about experience quality. This is a role for someone who has led customer- or student-facing operations teams and owned outcomes in NPS or customer satisfaction scores.

What the role is about: You will own the end-to-end student experience during the training programs at Kraftshala. Your mandate is simple but non-trivial: deliver consistently high student delight (NPS), ensure experience excellence across live cohorts, improve learning outcomes, reduce escalations and drop-offs, and build systems that allow us to scale student experience sustainably.

Why you should apply:

• You get ownership of outcomes that truly matter: student success, experience, and scale
  
• You’ll lead and grow high-impact associates and senior associates driving individual batches
  
• You’ll work in a fast-growing, accountability-heavy environment with real decision-making power
  
• You’ll shape how thousands of learners experience Kraftshala as we scale
  

About us: Kraftshala is India’s largest higher-education institution in terms of marketing placements, with a 94% placement rate, and we are gunning to become the world’s largest career launchpad, across domains.

We’re backed by a number of eminent investors including ex-unicorn startup founders and CXOs of global giants like RedBus, NoBroker, Nestlé, and Performics.

The Detailed Version

The Operations Lead is responsible for owning and elevating the student experience across Kraftshala’s programs. Reporting to the Head of Operations, this role combines people leadership, experience design, and operational rigour.

Your success will be measured by how predictably and excellently programs run, how delighted students feel throughout their journey, how well the students learn, how effectively student concerns are managed, how engaged students feel, and how well the student experience scales as cohorts and teams grow.

Responsibilities

1. Run Scalable, Error-Resistant Program Operations

Design and operate tight, predictable systems for running live cohorts covering schedules, communications, dependencies, and handoffs so students experience consistency and reliability at every touchpoint.

This role requires moving beyond firefighting to proactively identifying risks, fixing root causes, and reducing operational and experience-related friction at scale.

Success Metrics

• Schedule adherence & on-time delivery
  
• Operational error rate and escalation recurrence
  

2. Own End-to-End Student Experience

Be the single-point owner for the student journey across programs from onboarding to completion ensuring students feel supported, challenged, and confident in their progress and outcomes. This includes translating student feedback into meaningful improvements, balancing empathy with accountability, and maintaining experience quality as cohorts scale.

Success Metrics

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) and feedback quality trends
  
• Student completion rates
  

3. Improve Student Learning Outcomes

Partner with different stakeholders - academics, external experts, placements team- to ensure students are not just attending sessions, but actually learning and progressing. Actively identify learning bottlenecks - across concepts, pace, assessments, or confidence - and drive interventions to unblock student progress.

This pillar is about using data, observation, and feedback to continuously raise learning effectiveness across cohorts.

Success Metrics

• Student progression against benchmarks
  
• Reduction in learning-related escalations and stagnation points
  

4. Drive Student Advocacy, Engagement & Community

Build a strong sense of belonging and advocacy by designing high-impact engagement models - clubs, peer-led initiatives, cohort rituals, and online community structures - that deepen participation and peer learning.

Own the design of a scalable online learning school that encourages contribution, knowledge-sharing, and mutual accountability, turning students into advocates rather than participants

Success Metrics

• Student participation
  
• Student advocacy
  

5. Lead & Scale a High-Ownership Program Management Team

Build, coach, and develop a team of Program Managers / Student Success Associates who operate with clarity, judgment, and accountability toward students. Set clear performance standards, enable independent decision-making, and grow future leaders who can run cohorts end-to-end.

Success Metrics

• Team performance against OKRs
  
• Team engagement, internal feedback & attrition
  

What Makes This Role Hard (and Exciting)

• You operate in ambiguity at scale. Live cohorts bring unpredictable challenges. You’ll constantly make judgment calls while balancing speed, quality, and empathy.
  
• You build systems while programs are live. Improving processes without pausing execution is hard but every fix compounds across future cohorts.
  
• You influence across teams. Driving student outcomes requires working with Academics, Placements, Product, and Tech - often without direct authority.
  
• Your work has a real impact. Decisions you make directly affect student confidence, engagement, and career outcomes making the responsibility high and the reward meaningful.
  
• You own outcomes, not tasks. Success is measured by student experience, learning progression, and trust not by how well processes are followed.
  

Monthly Outcomes

Month 1:

• Own a live cohort end-to-end as a Program Manager
  
• Build deep understanding of current student journeys, pain points, and operational gaps
  
• Establish baseline metrics for NPS, escalations, and drop-offs
  

Month 2:

• Start driving targeted improvements in cohort operations and student communication
  
• Coach Program Managers using real cohort insights
  
• Increase student engagement and student learning outcomes through targeted measures
  

Month 3 and beyond:

• Standardize best-in-class student success playbooks
  
• Build scalable systems to support larger cohorts without proportional headcount growth
  
• Consistently deliver high NPS and low drop-offs across programs
  

Must Haves:

• 5-8 years of experience in people-forward (preferably edtech or higher education), customer-facing operations roles (e.g., Customer Operations, CX, Service Delivery), with demonstrated ownership of experience quality, execution excellence, and scaling systems in NPS- or retention-driven, high-growth environments (We are not too fussed about the number of years. Experience is simply a proxy for capability, which is what we really care for)
  
• Proven people leadership experience, including managing and developing individual contributors or managers
  
• High accountability and responsibility to ensure flawless execution on a day-to-day basis
  
• A structured approach to problem-solving, that involves struggling with the problem until you are able to isolate the Why before coming to a solution
  
• High levels of emotional intelligence, in particular empathy and listening ability
  

Selection Process:

As a small team, we must get to know each other before taking the leap. We want to ensure you succeed in your role within our team. Each conversation with us will last about 30-60 minutes. The process will occur over a mix of virtual and in-person meetings.

• Conversation 1: This will be a call with the HR Team to understand your profile briefly and share the details of the selection process.
  
• Technical Exercise: This is a specific assessment designed to evaluate your fit for this role
  
• Conversation 2: This will be a conversation with our Head of Operations wherein you can expect to have a discussion on the technical exercise along with specific competencies required for the role.  
  
• Conversation 3: A conversation with our CEO to ensure that there is a fit with the Kraftshala Kode.
  
• Extending an offer: If all goes well, we will extend an offer that will mention the relevant details.
  

Location:

Delhi / Gurgaon

Know more about Kraftshala’s philosophy, culture and investors here.