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 an emphasis 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.
Our initial success was with an entirely remote solution which identified the top computer scientists in the region, taught them how to pass interviews, vetted them, and helped them find amazing jobs (both remote and on-site). And it worked: at Google 71% of our referrals in our last batch were hired. We've converted that learning into a multi-modal, self-learning online platform so we can exponentially grow the number of people we help. Our platform already has more than 50k active users each month and is rapidly growing.
Our team previously worked at Google, Amazon, Upwork, Nvidia, Box, and Gaza Sky Geeks. We are experienced founders, operators, and technologists. We value diversity in our own team as much as we do in the industry. For example, our engineering team includes people in 7 different countries and is 50% female.
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).
What we offer all members of our team:
As a member of a small team of product people and engineers at a growing startup, every day you will be working to find and document issues in our core product. We are constantly innovating new ways to help our users and make their experience better, so we rely on every member of our team to have a strong ownership mindset. This helps us ship fast and maintain high quality in our work.
Our tech product’s mission is to:
Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow for the MENA region. :-)
You’ll work with product to understand expected behavior and UX, develop and implement test plans for our Next.js/Node application, help identify recurring issues with our product, and generally act as a driver of positive change to a more bug free product and development process.
Our team believes strongly in constant learning and growth. Our tech stack covers a wide variety of tools and requires regular collaboration and knowledge sharing. The ideal candidate prides themselves on their ability to quickly learn and one who goes out of their way to share that learning with the team.
Responsibilities:
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!
We are a fully remote team but often like to work 'synchronously asynchronous', so your specific location doesn't matter but, to guarantee effective teamwork, we generally require our developers to be between UTC-4 and UTC+3. To ensure we all have time to work together each day, we require everyone to be available from noon to 4 p.m. UTC.
Our dev team today is spread between Brazil, Egypt, France, Jordan, Palestine, Poland, and the UK. Our company also has staff in the US, other parts of MENA, and beyond! The US team travels regularly to Europe (including Eastern Europe) and MENA, and we do 1-2 annual, company-wide meetups for everyone to get together, socialize, and co-work.