Operations Specialist

What This Role Is

Every year, tens of thousands of students across India, Southeast Asia, and beyond make one of the most consequential decisions of their lives: where to study, which country to move to, which university to apply for. For most of them, the distance between a decision and an enrolled offer letter is not the quality of their application. It's whether the operational infrastructure behind that application is fast, accurate, and relentless enough to get them across the line.

This is not an abstract problem. A UCAS deadline missed by twenty-four hours ends a student's UK cycle. A document submitted to the wrong portal section delays an offer by weeks. A status field left un-updated means a counselor makes the wrong call in a meeting that afternoon. The stakes in this work are measured in individual students, individual families, individual futures - and the quality of the operations function determines whether those futures open or close.

Cialfo's Direct Apply function sits at the center of this. It is the mechanism that takes a student's application from the Cialfo platform and moves it into the actual admissions systems of hundreds of universities across the UK, Australia, the US, and beyond - with accuracy, with speed, and under SLA. As Cialfo's school network grows and as Kaaiser's counseling workflows begin to centralise into this infrastructure, the volume and complexity of what flows through this function is only increasing.

You own the end-to-end execution of ROW applications - every submission, every status update, every task escalation, and every data point that tells the team what's moving and what isn't.

What Makes This Role Different

Most operations roles in the overseas education industry are reactive. Applications come in; you process them; you move on. This role is different because the function it sits in is actively being built. The centralisation of Kaaiser's student workflows into the Cialfo Direct Apply infrastructure means the scope of what you manage is expanding in real time - not years from now, now. The processes that work for today's volume will need to scale, and the person in this seat will be part of deciding how.

You also work across the full Manifest ecosystem. The students flowing through this function come from Cialfo's 2,000+ partner schools globally. The destinations span the corridors that Kaaiser has spent three decades building credibility in - India to Australia, India to the UK, India to North America. No standalone operations function in the market sees this breadth of destination and source school simultaneously. That context makes you sharper, and it makes the data you generate more valuable to every team above you.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Cialfo is growing. And the Direct Apply function is one of the primary reasons why - because schools trust that when a student's application goes through Cialfo, it lands correctly and on time.

What You Own

• Own end-to-end submission of applications from Cialfo schools across regions - receiving, assessing, and entering application data accurately into the relevant university portals
• Ensure every application meets SLA commitments and is submitted with full accuracy, every time
• Track outstanding tasks and additional document requirements, working with the broader team to chase and close gaps before deadlines are breached
• Keep student-facing platform records updated in real time so counselors always have a current, accurate view of where each application stands
• Build and circulate reports tracking application volumes, offer rates, and acceptances by region, providing the internal teams with the data they need to prioritise follow-up
• Identify, escalate, and resolve document errors and pipeline issues before they become student-level failures
• Own the accuracy of the data that flows out of this function - if a number is wrong in a report, it's yours to catch before anyone else does
• Support junior Operations Specialists on the team, helping them build the technical knowledge and accuracy standards the function depends on

What Success Looks Like

• The markers below reflect where the Student Placements operations function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
• In your first three months, you've taken full ownership of the ROW application pipeline. You know the key deadlines, the university portals, the edge cases, and the gaps. You've introduced yourself to the rhythm of the role without needing to be told what's urgent - you can already see it in the queue. The team trusts your accuracy and your follow-through.
• By the six-month mark, applications are moving through your pipeline faster and with fewer errors than before you arrived. Your reports are being used - not just circulated. The counselors and the teams downstream from you have a cleaner, more reliable view of student application status. The junior members of the team are sharper because you've been in the room with them.
• At twelve months, the Kaaiser workflow integration hasn't broken the function. It's grown into it. You've helped build the process documentation and the quality checks that let the team scale without losing accuracy. What you've built in this seat outlasts your presence in any single application cycle.
• The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

• You have spent the better part of two to four years working inside overseas education admissions - at an agency, a platform, a university liaison function, or somewhere adjacent. You know what UCAS feels like under deadline pressure. You've submitted applications to Australian universities and understand the differences in portal behaviour, documentation requirements, and institutional timelines across UK, US, and ANZ destinations. You don't need a manual to tell you what's urgent - you've developed the instinct for it.
• Your relationship with accuracy is non-negotiable. Not because someone told you it matters, but because you've seen what happens when a field is wrong or a document goes to the wrong place. You are the kind of person who re-checks before submitting, who flags an anomaly in a data report before it goes out, and who considers a correctly completed application a professional standard, not a box ticked.
• You are comfortable working in a globally distributed environment where applications arrive from multiple time zones and deadlines don't always align with your calendar. You've worked this way before, or you're clear-eyed about what it requires. Flexibility isn't a line on your CV - it's how the job actually works.
• You are coachable. You are willing to be a hands-on contributor regardless of the task in front of you. When you mentor others, you do it because you understand that the quality of the function depends on everyone in it - not just you. You don't wait for a manager to tell you something is broken. You surface it.
• Most importantly, you read the description of what the Direct Apply function is building and your first reaction was not "this is an admin role." It was something closer to: I know exactly how these pipelines should run, and I can see what needs to improve. 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.

For this role specifically, the Direct Apply function is the operational heartbeat of the student mobility mission. Everything Cialfo promises a school - that a student's application will land correctly, on time, and be tracked transparently - flows through this team. And as Kaaiser's counseling workflows centralise into this infrastructure, the function's reach extends further into the India corridor that has always been at the core of what Manifest is building. The work here is not peripheral. It's load-bearing.

Cialfo is part of Manifest Global - a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.