Program Manager

Programs Manager

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, 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

To achieve our ambitious vision, we’re seeking a Programs Manager:

Programs:

• Manage & run end-to-end programs for the Manara community in collaboration with B2B partners or original programs
• Collaborating with product, talent placement, community management, marketing & other relevant stakeholders when required to design and execute programs
• Owning programs OKRs and KPIs from marketing & content curation to funnel optimization, engagement & completion rates

Community:

• Managing Manara’s community stakeholders (Current learners, Alumni, Mentors)
• Create and optimize processes for managing the community
• Track metrics that indicate healthy retention & growth of community
• Proactively plan and execute initiatives and activities that increase the community engagement
• Consolidating users feedback on product and program
• Create & manage content plan for community
• Design experiments to define which content is the most effective
• Track metrics that indicate community engagement growth in relation to content

Events:

• Design & execute online & offline events that grow Manara’s community and brand in MENA region including running the below operations that include but are not limited to:

• BD with relevant partners
• Speakers & Agenda management
• Venue & Logistics related
• Event planning & branding

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!

• Project management: You align stakeholders (e.g., volunteers, staff members) and make sure they get their commitments done on time. You deliver efficiently and on deadline, and provide status updates or get unblocked. You take ownership and get a lot done independently. You execute a variety of tasks with high reliability and few errors. You track & follow up on dozens of details. 
• Operations: You can figure out how to create processes & efficiencies & excellent experiences where none existed. How to go from 10 to 1000. You work with engineers effectively to build tools, or find and manage vendor relationships yourself.
• Experience setting up & using tech tools: Airtable, Salesforce, Google Spreadsheets, etc. You identify vendors and implement their software when it can accelerate our work.

• Entrepreneur: You are scrappy, 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 build teams/organizations that thrive at each stage of their growth. You can figure out what Manara’s next service/product will be.
• People/service-oriented: You love our talent community. You enjo working with people directly & serving them with excellence. 

• 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.

Knock our socks off:

• Strategic: You identify opportunities for improvement or innovation. You quickly develop solutions for a variety of needs. You listen to users and do competitive analyses.
• Excellent manager: People love working with you and they grow quickly when they do. You scale your impact through others. You’re effective at recruiting, training, and managing people.
• Talent industry expertise: You have experience in the recruitment/talent industry (especially for software engineers) and can thus hit the ground running and grow our own team’s expertise in this area.
• Product strategy: You have great ideas about how to go from placing 100 engineers per year to 1000, without growing our team. You collaborate effectively with engineers and designers. 
• MENA expertise: You speak Arabic or are familiar with the Middle East & North Africa
• 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).
• Passion for Manara’s mission of creating a community that unlocks the full potential of top tech talent in MENA (with a focus on Palestine & women)

Note: We are a hybrid remote company with colleagues based internationally in the US, Europe, and MENA, and a team based in Cairo. This role is based in Cairo. Our remote global team travels regularly to Cairo for team meetups