Senior (Founding) Product Designer

This position can be full-time, or less than full-time, and can be located anywhere!

As our Senior (Founding) Product Designer at Manara, you will play a lead role in designing our first consumer-facing product. 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). Having proven market fit, your role as our founding designer will be to provide a delightful experience for the users of our training & job placement program and empower us to place 10x more engineers in world-class jobs. You will have a green field to establish our product experience, collaborating to inform roadmaps, new initiatives and will have a leading role in driving design direction, including the UX and the UI! 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.  

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 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.

Your Role

As our first Senior Product Designer, you will be deeply involved in the product development process, making strategic and tactical UX decisions related to design and usability as well as features and functions. 

Our tech product's mission is to provide value as a standalone solution which:

1. Teaches non-traditional candidates how to do behavioral interviews & write resumes
2. Supports them with their job hunt so they know how to conduct it
3. Builds a community of the top talent in the Middle East & North Africa so they can inspire & support each other

Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow for this region. :-)

We are currently using a V1 of the product that we built with existing components. Without an effective designer, we have hit the limit of what we can achieve.

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!

• Leadership: You don't see Human-Centered Design as a buzzword, you live to create a product design that resonates with your audience at their core, and draws them into the experience. You are a confident Senior Product Designer and will lead the user experience (not just individual features) from conception to launch. You love learning, are open to feedback, and can quickly adapt. You thrive working in a startup environment where there is constant change, and can get things done efficiently and accurately with little supervision. 

• User Experience: You have a strong passion for understanding users' needs and creating elegant and intuitive experiences that delight them. You possess the ability to turn abstract ideas into functional and valuable designs, and have experience defining success metrics to continuously improve the user experience. Your expertise in bridging the gap between technology and design will be crucial as you establish UX patterns across the product.

• Visual Design: You have a keen eye for detail and an exceptional talent for creating visually stunning designs. Your expertise in typography, desktop/mobile UI, color, layout, iconography and aesthetic sense, and how they impact product function, is unmatched. You have experience using design tools such as Sketch, Zeplin, InVision, Figma, or other UX/UI design tools and have a deep understanding of the latest UX/UI trends. As our first designer, you will also establish the UI style guide and component system.

• Community Expertise: You have a deep understanding of what makes communities and social networks stick, and have experience working at companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Stack Overflow, Udacity, or other community and edtech platforms. Your expertise in this area will be invaluable as you help to establish features that will empower the top tech talent in the Middle East & North Africa to support each other and reach their dream jobs. With your deep understanding of human behavior and your ability to hit the ground running, you will be a critical asset in our mission to build the top tech talent community in the region.

Knock our socks off

• Management: You have management skills or want to develop them. As our design team grows, you'd like to establish its culture & manage other designers.
• 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. Most of our team today is based in the SF Bay Area and co-works once/week. We also have a team member in Berlin and another in Palestine, and aim to grow our teams there. Our US team travels regularly to Europe and MENA and we plan to do an annual meetup for our global team.