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.
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 a member of a small team of engineers at a growing startup, every day you will be working on improvements to 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:
- Upskill our users across a variety of technical and behavioral skills
- Improve access to learning critical skills and knowledge for underserved communities in MENA
- Build a community of technical talent in MENA where they can inspire & support each other
Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow for the MENA region. :-)
You’ll implement complex workflows in our Next.js/Node application, help build out our AWS infrastructure, and generally help with the challenges all growing startups face. Note: Knowing Next.js and AWS is a nice-to-have but not a requirement for this role.
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.
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):
- Write high-quality, maintainable code with unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
- Experience collaborating with a team on a shared codebase.
- Work with JavaScript and Node.js.
- Comfortable working on both front-end and back-end technologies.
- Focus on business value and how your choices impact our users. You don’t want to simply complete tickets, you want to understand how each ticket gets us closer to our goals.
Technical skills (not required):
- Next.js knowledge
- RDBMS experience (PostgreSQL preferred)
- AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, and S3
Soft skills:
- Remote: You have experience working on effective remote teams & thrive in such environments. You work well across time zones (e.g., you communicate effectively via asynchronous oral & verbal channels).
- Ability to handle ambiguity: we’re an early-stage startup which means the roadmap will change
- 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 at Manara. For example, you partner closely with our sales leader who manages our hiring partner network to make matches between our participants and companies. 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.)
- 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 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 9am to 1pm PST/PDT.
Our dev team today is spread between Brazil, Egypt, France, Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, 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.
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