Principal Engineer, Infrastructure

About the role

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 betwe

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