Principal Engineer, Infrastructure

Manifest Global empowers in building companies that connect the world towards growth, prosperity, and innovation. Our portfolio includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, Kaaiser, EduGo, and Flow AI and which are dedicated to expanding global student mobility by serving their respective stakeholders in the ecosystem. 

Our Mission 

To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education through our world-class network of portfolio brands; a network that globally connects community stakeholders that provide the finest resources and support material, anywhere in the world and at any time.

What This Role Is

Every product Manifest Global operates - Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, Kaaiser - runs on infrastructure. The AWS platform underneath them handles the traffic from 2,000+ schools, hundreds of thousands of students, and 1,000+ university partners across 50+ countries. When it works well, nobody notices. When it doesn't, a counselor can't access a student's application, a university's outreach campaign stalls, a placement goes wrong. The infrastructure is invisible only when it's excellent.

Most multi-brand technology groups at this scale have solved the infrastructure problem the obvious way: each product team builds its own, defends its own, and calls on a central team as a last resort. The result is fragmentation - duplicated systems, inconsistent reliability, and an engineering tax that compounds quietly until it starts slowing everything down. The better answer is a shared platform that product teams consume freely, that raises the engineering standard across the portfolio without requiring constant coordination, and that gets more valuable the more brands and engineers build on top of it.

Manifest is building that platform. The Platform Team is the engineering group responsible for it - the paved paths, the CI/CD pipelines, the observability layer, the self-service tooling that lets a product engineer in one brand build and ship without waiting on infrastructure. The work spans the full Manifest portfolio. The leverage is real. And the person who owns the infrastructure layer is the person who decides, in practical terms, what kind of engineering organisation Manifest becomes.

This role owns the AWS infrastructure platform across Manifest's family of products - and the mandate to turn it from a per-brand dependency into a shared, self-service foundation every engineering team builds on freely.

What Makes This Role Different

Most infrastructure roles at this scale ask you to maintain something that already exists. This one asks you to redesign something that is working well enough to be dangerous - functional enough that nobody is screaming, not good enough to scale. The person in this role will make architectural calls that shape how Manifest's engineering organisation operates for the next several years. That's a different kind of ownership than keeping the lights on.

The Manifest ecosystem is the other differentiator. You are not building infrastructure for one product. You are building it for five, across different technology profiles, different traffic patterns, and different compliance requirements - student data residency, GDPR, the overlapping regulatory surface that comes with operating in 50+ countries. The complexity is real. So is the leverage: a reliability improvement you make to the core platform lands across the entire portfolio simultaneously. A self-service tool you ship gets used by data engineers, product engineers, and ML teams across every brand. The multiplier here is not available at a single-product company.

And the timing is right. Manifest has the scale to make infrastructure investment genuinely worthwhile, and the organisational appetite to do it properly. This is the moment - before another layer of complexity makes it harder - to build the platform that the next phase of the company runs on.

What You Own

The AWS platform across Manifest's products

• Own the design, build, and ongoing optimisation of the production AWS infrastructure serving all Manifest brands, with high availability and scalability as the baseline
• Define the architectural standards and guardrails that give product teams freedom to build without creating fragility at the platform level
• Ensure the platform is compliant with student data residency requirements, GDPR, and the access control obligations that come with operating across 50+ countries
• Drive the infrastructure roadmap in direct partnership with engineering leads across Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and the central Platform Team

Self-healing systems and observability

• Build the automation layer that detects, escalates, and recovers from platform problems before they surface as incidents for engineering teams
• Own the observability infrastructure - metrics, logging, alerting - so every team has the visibility they need to operate their services with confidence
• Define and maintain the reliability standards against which platform performance is measured

Everything-as-Code

• Own the infrastructure-as-code posture across the platform - Terraform or CloudFormation, applied consistently and extended as the platform evolves
• Ensure security, compliance, and quality controls are expressed in the pipeline rather than inspected in manually after the fact
• Build the testing and validation infrastructure that lets engineers ship faster and safer simultaneously

CI/CD and the developer experience

• Own the continuous integration and deployment pipelines that product engineers build and release through every day
• Drive down the friction between writing code and shipping it - the pipeline should be an accelerant, not a bottleneck
• Identify and eliminate the recurring manual interventions that slow engineering velocity across the portfolio

The self-service platform

• Build the tooling that allows developers and data engineers to provision, configure, and operate their own infrastructure without opening a ticket
• Your success in this area is measured by reduction in cross-team dependencies, not by tickets closed
• Proactively identify where teams are coming to you repeatedly for the same thing, and build the paved path that removes that dependency permanently

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Manifest's Platform Team is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

In your first weeks, you have a clear picture of where the current infrastructure stands and where it doesn't. You have a point of view - not a presentation, a point of view - on the two or three architectural decisions that matter most in the next six months. You have talked to the engineering leads across the brands and you understand where the platform is serving them well and where it isn't. You are already writing code.

By mid-period, something is measurably better. A reliability metric has moved. A team that used to come to you for a particular thing no longer does - because you built the path. The CI/CD pipeline is faster, or more stable, or both. You have shipped infrastructure improvements that product engineers noticed and appreciated. The platform team has a higher bar than it did before you arrived.

Long-term, you have built a platform that the next generation of Manifest engineers inherits as a foundation, not a problem. The architectural decisions you made are legible - they can be extended by engineers who weren't in the room when you made them. The self-service tooling you built handles a class of requests that used to require you. The engineering organisation is more capable because of the standards you raised. The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You have spent serious time building, deploying, and maintaining production cloud infrastructure at scale - on AWS, in environments where the cost of failure was real. You have the operational experience to know the difference between infrastructure that performs well in demos and infrastructure that holds up at 2am on a Tuesday. You have the production scar tissue to prove it, and you carry those lessons into every architectural decision you make.

You are genuinely fluent in containers - Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, the full stack of how services run, scale, and fail in production. Infrastructure-as-Code is not a tool you have used; it is how you think. Terraform or CloudFormation, used seriously on real systems, not inherited configurations you have maintained. You are hands-on with CI/CD tooling and have opinions about what good looks like - because you have seen what happens when it isn't.

You have an automation reflex. When you encounter a repetitive manual task, your instinct is not to do it faster. It is to eliminate it. This reflex extends to the way you think about the platform as a whole: you are not building infrastructure for infrastructure's sake, you are building it so that other engineers can do their jobs better. The self-service instinct is genuine - you measure your success partly by how rarely people need to come to you.

You can communicate clearly across the engineering organisation. When you have made an architectural decision, you can explain it in a way that engineering leads at a different brand can understand, challenge, and build on. You write documentation that other people actually use. You have the judgment to tell the difference between reliability work that matters to the business and gold-plating that doesn't.

You are comfortable with the complexity this role carries. Five brands, multiple technology profiles, overlapping compliance requirements, a platform that has to serve different engineering teams with different needs simultaneously - this does not feel like a problem to you. It feels like the interesting part. Somewhere underneath the technical depth, you understand that the platform you are building connects to something larger: the counselors who use these products, the students whose trajectories they shape, the families who have made real bets on what happens next.

Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest Global is building and your first reaction was not "this is a good infrastructure role." It was something closer to - someone has to build the platform that holds all of this together properly, and I know exactly how to do it. 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 Platform Team is the engineering foundation that every Manifest product runs on. The infrastructure decisions made here are not scoped to one brand or one market - they propagate across the entire portfolio. A Principal Engineer who raises the reliability standard, ships the self-service tooling, and builds the CI/CD platform that product teams trust is not supporting Manifest's mission from the side. They are load-bearing to it. The products cannot scale if the platform doesn't.

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.