Operations Manager - Student Visa

We are looking for a hands-on and highly driven Operations Manager - Student Visa to lead and scale Leverage Edu's student visa operations across multiple study-abroad destinations. The person will own the end-to-end student visa journey, ensuring applications are accurate, compliant, timely and delivered with a high level of student experience. This role will involve managing visa teams, building strong processes, tracking performance, handling complex cases and staying ahead of changes in immigration and visa policies. The role requires someone who can build processes from the ground up, manage large teams, solve escalations and drive outcomes through data and operational discipline.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Visa Operations and Delivery:

• Own end-to-end student visa operations across multiple countries/destinations.
• Ensure timely and accurate submission of visa applications.
• Establish clear SLAs and turnaround times for every stage of the visa process.
• Monitor application pipelines, pending cases, deadlines, visa decisions and withdrawals.
• Ensure high-quality documentation and minimise errors, rework and visa refusals.
• Take ownership of critical and escalated visa cases.

Country and Compliance Management:

• Build deep operational expertise across key student destinations.
• Ensure teams follow country-specific immigration, embassy, university and documentation requirements.
• Keep the organisation updated on changes in visa policies and immigration regulations.
• Develop country-wise checklists, SOPs and quality-control mechanisms.
• Conduct regular audits of visa files to ensure compliance and documentation quality.

Team Leadership:

• Lead, manage and mentor a team of visa counsellors/operations executives.
• Allocate cases and workloads based on capacity, complexity and deadlines.
• Set clear KPIs and productivity benchmarks for the team.
• Conduct regular performance reviews and identify training requirements.
• Build a culture of ownership, accountability and speed.

Process and Automation:

• Build and continuously improve visa SOPs and workflows.
• Identify operational bottlenecks and reduce turnaround time.
• Improve documentation accuracy and first-time-right submission rates.
• Work with product/tech teams to automate repetitive visa processes and tracking.
• Build scalable processes that can support increasing student volumes.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in student visa operations, study-abroad operations, immigration services or international student services.
• Experience managing large visa operations/team(s).
• Strong understanding of student visa processes across multiple countries.
• Strong knowledge of visa documentation, compliance and embassy requirements.
• Proven experience in managing high-volume operations with strict SLAs.
• Strong people-management and stakeholder-management skills.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong attention to detail and ability to handle complex cases.
• High ownership, urgency and bias for action.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, target-driven environment.