Chief of Staff

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 subSaharan 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 pass 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, 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

To achieve our ambitious vision, we're seeking a Chief of Staff. You will be the operational glue that holds Manara together and a key strategist. You'll support our co-founders closely, learning exactly what it's like to run an early-stage startup that is growing quickly. You'll work at all levels - from sending important updates to investors, to designing a solution to help women engineers ask for promotions, to executing the tiniest operational details (figuring out how to get swag ordered & delivered to our participants in Gaza, following up with our clients to make sure they signed their contracts, issuing payments, etc).

This role is an excellent alternative to an MBA for someone who is a strong executor and willing to spend 50% of their time on strategic work and 50% on business operations. The expectation is that you will grow out of this role within 1-2 years into a dream role that you create for yourself on the Manara team, while developing & executing a plan to ensure that the remaining functions in this role are met. For instance, you might hire & manage a business operations team or identify technical solutions that decrease our need for staff in that area.

We are an early-stage startup with a 15-person team which means we have a lot of leeway to shape our roles to best fit our individual interests.

Your Qualifications

Note: Diverse candidates often screen themselves out of job applications. Please don't do that - it never hurts to apply if you're excited about the role.

• Strategic: you identify opportunities for improvement or innovation. You quickly develop solutions for a variety of needs: increasing our operations & productivity 10x, and develop solutions that could even be our next product or service. You listen to stakeholders and do analyses in order to produce the best outcomes.
• Entrepreneur: you are scrappy, and comfortable with ambiguity and change. You experiment & iterate quickly. You take immense pride in creating solutions that will have long-term impact and you find their monetization opportunities. You can think on your own when something out of the box happens and you can solve complex issues.
• Excellent manager: you carefully manage sensitive information. You create an environment in which everyone feels safe and collaborative. You can work effectively with other people at Manara and you roll up your sleeves to support a team member when needed.
• External communication: you interface regularly with high-value stakeholders like investors or strategic partners and you know which information to share & how to motivate them to engage in valuable ways. You can write in nearly perfect English, and communicate fluently orally.
• Reliable executor: you estimate your time correctly, deliver what you committed to efficiently and on deadline, and provide status updates or get unblocked. You take ownership where expected and collaborate effectively with others.
• Detail-oriented: you execute on a variety of tasks (issue payments, build financial models, update data in databases, follow up with clients to collect their contracts) with high reliability and few errors. You track & follow up on dozens of details.

Knock our socks off–added bonus if you have experience in:

• Finances: You create and maintain financial models, file taxes, etc.
• Recruiting/HR: You love articulating values, figuring out the best way to build a small startup that will become a world-class company, developing incentive structures, and finding & recruiting the best people to the team.
• Talent industry: Expertise or familiarity with the talent industry, especially for software engineers
• MENA: Speak Arabic or are familiar with the Middle East & North Africa
• Tech: Worked with product & engineering teams successfully to launch features
• Remote: Experience or passion for working on remote teams
• Sales: You set up and manage an effective sales process including a CRM like Salesforce and an approach to identify and convert leads, and grow accounts

Location

We are a fully remote team, so you can be located anywhere. For this Chief of Staff position, you will need to be available from 8 am-4 pm Pacific Standard Time. Our leadership team is based in the SF Bay Area and will need to work with you closely; the rest of our team is spread across the globe from Pakistan to the West Coast.

How to Apply

Apply here