Manara is a social impact startup whose mission is to unlock human potential and diversify the global tech sector while uplifting the economies of the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), with a focus on Palestine and women. The region has the highest youth unemployment in the world (higher than sub-Saharan Africa) despite high levels of tertiary education. Women are particularly impacted: in Palestine, 52% of computer science students are women but 83% of them end up unemployed.
We run an entirely remote solution to identify the top computer scientists in the region, teach them how to perform well in their interviews, vet them, and help them find amazing jobs (whether remote or on-site). It works: at Google 71% of our referrals in our last batch were hired.
We don’t stop at job placement. Our vision is to build the top tech talent community in the MENA region and support them at each stage in their lifecycle to help them reach their dreams: how to get a promotion, become a manager, be the first woman engineer on a team, etc. The community is driven by a tech product that facilitates connection, shared learning, and motivation.
Our team previously worked at Google, Amazon, Upwork, Nvidia, and Gaza Sky Geeks. Our investors include Stripe, Y Combinator, Seedcamp, Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Namrata Ganatra (the former CTO of Lambda School), Christina Sass (the former President of Andela), and Emma Tracey (the founder of Honeypot).
Your Role
As one of early stage engineers at a growing startup, you will have a broad role in helping shape the front-end of our tech product. You will be closely involved in determining which features we build and how we design the user experience.
Our tech product’s initial mission is to provide a delightful experience for the users of our training & job placement program and empower us to place 10x more engineers in world-class jobs without having 10x the staff & expenses. For example, our participants should be able to book mock interviews with volunteers from top tech companies like Google after browsing the profiles of mock interviewers and seeing which are available. They also need to be able to keep track of their assignments and see how they are performing compared to other classmates.
Our tech product’s next mission is to provide value as a standalone solution which:
- Teaches non-traditional candidates how to do behavioral interviews & write resumes
- Supports them with their job hunt so they know how to conduct it
- Builds a community of the top talent in the Middle East & North Africa so they can inspire & support each other
Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow for the MENA region. :-)
You’ll architect and develop enterprise ready web applications for delightful user interfaces with high code quality, reusability and maintainability.
We will invest heavily in your growth. You will be managed by a seasoned engineering manager & architect.
Your Qualifications
Note: Diverse candidates often screen themselves out of job applications if they don’t have all the qualifications. Please apply if you’re excited about the role - we’d love to see your application!
Technical skills (required, in no particular order):
- Write high-quality, maintainable code with unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
- Work closely with stakeholders in a cross-functional team, collaborating effectively with Operations, Product, Design, etc.
- Work with the latest technologies such as Javascript, Typescript and Node.
- Focus on business value. You don’t want to simply complete tickets, you want to understand how each ticket gets us closer to our goals.
Technical skills (nice to have):
- Experience mentoring junior engineers
- Next.js knowledge
- Ability to figure out when it makes sense to build our own product vs buying existing software from a vendor
Soft skills:
- Remote-ready: You have experience working on effective remote teams & thrive in such environments. You work well across time zones (e.g., you communicate effectively asynchronous via written & spoken channels).
- Ability to handle ambiguity: we’re an early-stage startup which means the roadmap will change. You view these kinds of changes as the positive sign of innovation that they are.
- Execution/project management: As a small startup, we depend heavily on each person to be reliable and effective. You get things done efficiently and accurately, with little need for supervision. You use tools like Jira & remember everything that needs to get done.
- Collaboration/team player: You can work effectively with other people on your team and across our company. For example, you partner closely with our sales leader who manages our hiring partner network to understand what challenges those users have with our current UI so that you can make improvements to it. You collaborate with our training/program manager to develop new training programs based on what you see posing challenges for our job hunters. You roll up your sleeves to do the unglamorous work or support a team member when needed.
- Growth mentality: You love learning, are hungry for feedback, and can quickly learn new things (process, technologies, etc.).
- Mission-aligned: You’re passionate about Manara’s mission of creating a community that unlocks the full potential of top tech talent in MENA (with a focus on Palestine & women).
Location
We are a fully remote team, so you can be located anywhere. For this role we are primarily recruiting from Europe and the Middle East & North Africa but we are open to anywhere else for the right candidate. Our team today is spread between San Francisco, UK, Istanbul, France, and Palestine but we all maintain a few hours a day of overlap to ensure some time to facilitate synchronous communication. Our US team travels regularly to Europe (including Eastern Europe) and MENA, and we plan to do an annual meetup for our global team.
