As our Senior (Founding) Product Designer, 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 for our first consumer-facing product! This position can be full-time, or less than full-time, and can be located anywhere.
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 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.
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
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 initial mission is 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 without having to 10x the staff & expenses. For example, our participants should be able to book mock interviews with volunteers from top tech companies like Google after browsing the profiles of mock interviewers and seeing which are available. They also need to be able to keep track of their assignments and see how they are performing compared to other classmates.
Our tech product’s next mission is to provide value as a standalone solution which:
- Teaches non-traditional candidates how to do behavioral interviews & write resumes
- Supports them with their job hunt so they know how to conduct it
- 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. We have hit the limit of what we can achieve without an effective designer.
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!
- Product Design: You are a seasoned product designer with 4-7 years of UX and UI experience, designing digital products
- Visual Design: You are proficient in typography, desktop/mobile UI, color, layout, iconography, and aesthetic sense and how these elements impact product function. You will establish our UI style guide and component system. You’ve used Sketch, Zeplin, InVision, Figma, or other UX/UI design tools and have a deep understanding of UX/UI trends.
- Product Development: You understand the product development process, from discovery to problem definition, to detailed UX and visual design, and think in terms of design systems, not just screens in isolation
- UX: You can take broad, conceptual ideas and turn them into something useful and valuable for our users, designing end-to-end flows and experiences that are simple and elegant for our supported platforms. You will establish UX patterns that will be utilized across the product
- Entrepreneurship & iteration: You rapidly prototype ideas, working with engineering to test & launch them in an iterative way to test their value to users before investing too many resources in a certain direction. This includes creating a range of UX/UI deliverables, including user flowcharts, diagrams, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity interface mockups
- Leadership/ownership: You will be leading the user experience of our product (not just individual features) from conception to launch
- Empathy (and user research): You deeply empathize with and understand users and are able to identify their problems & opportunities. You can conduct your own user research, develop personas, and validate designs through usability testing
- Collaboration/team player: You can work effectively with other people at Manara. For example, you partner closely with our product leaders (our CEO and CTO) to develop the product roadmap, and with engineers to ensure that it gets built as expected. You respond well to feedback. You roll up your sleeves to do the unglamorous work or support a team member when needed.
- Growth mentality: You love learning, are open to feedback, and can quickly learn new things.
- 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 to remember everything that needs to get done.
- Ability to handle ambiguity: we’re an early-stage startup which means the roadmap will change
Knock Our Socks Off
- Expertise in social networks/communities or education technology: You have experience at a company like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, StackOverflow or Udacity. You can hit the ground running to suggest features that will empower the top talent in the Middle East & North Africa to support each other online & reach their dream jobs.
- 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)
Location
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 a 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.
How to Apply
- Complete the short video interview here: https://bit.ly/37pxJPR
- Apply through this form.
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