Job Opportunities in the Seedcamp Portfolio

About Manara: Manara is a mission-driven social impact startup focused on unlocking human potential in the MENA region and diversifying the global tech sector. We identify, train, and place the top tech talent from MENA into leading tech roles while fostering a supportive and empowering community. Imagine a platform that combines the best of LinkedIn, Udacity, and a vibrant tech community designed specifically for MENA’s brightest minds.

Role Overview: To achieve our ambitious vision, we’re seeking a Junior Chief of Staff. You will be the operational glue that holds Manara together. You’ll support our co-founders, C-level executives, and sales team closely. Your primary job won't be glamorous, but it will be important and give you high visibility until what it's like to run a startup. It'll include things like monitoring our inboxes for important emails from investors or customers & scheduling meetings. Once you have that detailed work under control, we'll give you additional strategic projects that align with your passions and our needs - whether recruiting top talent to the team, managing our financial projections, or improving how we manage OKRs.

This role is an excellent alternative to an MBA for someone who is a strong executor and excited to spend 70% on executive assistant style work and 30% of their time on strategic work.

We are an early-stage startup with a 20-person team where things change quickly, which means this role can be a stepping stone into another function.

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.

• Communication (internal and external): you interface regularly with high-value stakeholders like investors, strategic partners, and our own team. You know how to write messages quickly on a variety of platforms (Slack, email, whatsapp, LinkedIn), monitor thousands of messages a day on these platforms, figure out what to bring to a C-level exec’s attention, and which information to share with whom. You maintain tight confidentiality. You build strong relationships with both internal and external parties–people trust you.
• Reliable execution: 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. You keep everyone on track. You work quickly, managing your time based on your understanding of priorities and getting aligned with C-level executives when needed.
• Operations / project management: you are an effective operations / project management professional. You design systems that make sense to anyone looking at them for the first time. You document everything, whether it’s your work or other people’s work. You’re always thinking about how to run things smoothly & efficiently, and how to ensure business continuity if someone is out of office. You like tools like Asana, Hubspot, etc. You know how to chase everyone down and communicate across teams to make sure that business goals are met on time.
• Detail-orientedness: 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.
• Remote: Experience or passion for working on remote teams

Knock our socks off:

• Strategic: You understand the business context we’re operating in and suggest improvements that make an immense difference for our future. You listen to users and do competitive analyses. You make OKRs and strategic planning look easy.
• Sales operations and SDR: 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. You aren’t scared of figuring out what it means to be an SDR and doing some of that work at Manara.
• You have an interest in another key area of work that we may want to staff, such as Recruiting or Financial Projections
• Entrepreneurial: you are scrappy and comfortable with ambiguity and change. You experiment & iterate quickly.
• MENA: Speak Arabic or are familiar with the Middle East & North Africa
• People management: While we don't expect the person in this role to have experience as a manager, there is 1 person on the team that you could end up managing if you prove yourself capable.

Location

We are a hybrid team with most of the team based in Cairo and others based around MENA, Europe, the USA, etc. For this role you will need to align your time zone with the Dubai/Riyadh/Egypt time zone so that you can support a C-level executive while he is awake – your working hours may shift between 8am-5pm Cairo time to 12pm-10pm Cairo time depending on his schedule. We are open to hiring for this role outside of MENA for someone who can align time zones accordingly. The salary for this role is based on Egyptian salaries however, and knowledge of Arabic and Arab culture is a plus.

Note: we have a job description up for an Executive Assistant as well as one for a Chief of Staff. We only plan to fill one of these roles.