[Hiring] Director of Programs & Operations @Manara

This position can be located anywhere in the Middle East.  

As Manara's first Director of Program Operations you will have the leading role in overseeing our entire training and talent placement side of our organization. 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). We have two parts of the business, our training and talent placement services teams and our technology solution. You will be overseeing the training and talent placement services, and leading operations in the MENA region. This is a key leadership role within Manara and you will have a direct impact on helping Manara achieve its mission by driving business strategy and owning the P&L for our services division. 

We run an entirely remote solution to identify the top computer scientists in the MENA 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 the 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. Your job will be to oversee and scale these programs globally, from the Middle East. 

Your Role

As our first Director of Program Operations you will have a green field to establish our training and talent placement services experience, owning the roadmap, new initiatives and will have a leading role for all of our operations in the MENA region. This will include oversight of program growth, delivery of excellent in-region services, sales initiatives, and support with marketing campaigns. 

• Leading and growing a team of program managers to inspire engineers in the Middle East & North Africa to dream bigger, to make sure women succeed at equal rates as men, and to deliver outstanding service to our users and customers.
• Driving strategy and execution for our training and talent placement services, launching a new top-of-the-funnel solution to grow our vibrant engineer talent community, shaping, running & scaling our training & vetting process, & managing our talent placement approach, matching 100's, and eventually thousands, of engineers to careers in our hiring partner network.
• Spearheading operations for the MENA region, driving profit and growth. You will partner with sales to support closing new hiring partner deals, assist with fundraising in the region, partner with marketing to build brand awareness and conversion in the region, & leverage operations knowledge to build profitability for Manara through efficiency and scalability.
• Shaping Manara's future solutions by being an overlay to the CTO in shaping the digital product based on programming needs and learning, and help design how Manara tests and launches new services and products.  
• Inspiring an engaging talent community by overseeing all content creation efforts for the tech product to support programming and run our online communities (fireside chats, peer mentorship, practice interviews, trainings, events etc) for talent, alumni and mentors. 

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!

• Management: You are a stellar manager. Your teams know what is expected of them, deliver on their goals, and love the whole experience of working with you.
• 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. 
• 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. You think through the business opportunities.
• 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.
• 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.
• Experience setting up & using tech tools: Airtable, HubSpot, Google Spreadsheets, etc. You identify vendors and implement their software when it can accelerate our work.
• Collaboration/team player: You can work effectively with other people at Manara. You roll up your sleeves to do the unglamorous work or support a team member when needed.  

Knock our socks off:

• 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 3000, 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 and have developed a strong network within the region.
• 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)

We are a fully remote team, so you can be located anywhere in the Middle East. We are aiming to grow hubs in Berlin, Palestine, and the SF Bay Area. Our US team travels regularly to Europe and MENA and we plan to do an annual meetup for our global team.