Senior 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…