Operations Specialist

About this role

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…