Business Ops Associate & Executive Assistant

Business Operations Associate

Manara is a social impact startup whose mission is to unlock the human potential of the Middle East & North Africa, uplifting the region's economy and diversifying the global tech sector. We focus especially on Palestine and women. We are experienced founders, operators, and technologists with leading investors (including Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Stripe, Y Combinator, Seedcamp) and advisers from companies in similar spaces (Andela, Lambda School, and Honeypot).

This region has a rapidly growing population and a highly educated, diverse population. But nobody has cracked the puzzle of employment: college graduates face the highest youth unemployment in the world. Women are particularly impacted: in Palestine, 52% of computer science students are women, but 83% of them are unemployed. We run an entirely remote solution to identify the top talent, familiarize them with interviewing approaches, vet them, and find them 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 this region and support them at each stage in their lifecycle: 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

To achieve our ambitious mission, we are seeking Business Operations Associate. We also welcome more experienced candidates as long as you are willing to do the immediate work needed. Your core responsibility will be:

• Finance Operations: You will bill clients and users, pay suppliers and prepare regular reports and update internal databases to ensure this function operates efficiently.
• Sales/Revenue Operations: You will help the sales team in ensuring client onboarding, managing documents and processing orders in a timely manner and reaching out to clients to receive those.
• Executive Assistance: Monitor our CEO's email inbox, responding to messages that you can reply to directly to save her time, and flagging for her things that need to be handled quickly. Coordinate executives' calendars. Assist in planning travel.

In addition, we would be excited to hire someone who can take on these responsibilities:

• Operations Improvement: You will help develop suggestions to optimize and to solve problems. You will review company's policies and develop recommendations on how to improve them. You will create better processes and Standard Operating Procedures across the business.
• Customer Service: Monitor and manage emails coming from various types of customers (students enrolled in our program, potential students, etc). Ensure that their questions get answered speedily. 

Finally, we definitely do not require this for the role, but we'd be excited to give you these responsibilities if you'd like them in addition to the ones above:

• Project Coordination: You align stakeholders (e.g., clients, staff members) and make sure information is passed on throughout the business.
• Customer Service Manager: In the future as the customer service function grows, you could become the manager of this team.
• Chief of Staff: You take on ad hoc projects, some very strategic in nature (e.g., developing an MVP for our next program). You help manage investor relationships. You find other ways to free up our CEO's time. 

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!

• Experience: You have 2+ years of experience in jobs that are somewhat similar to this one.
• Reliable: You are a safe pair of hands and someone who can be trusted with responsibility for a job. Your team values and trust that you'll get things done. You deliver efficiently and on deadline and provide status updates or get unblocked. 
• Communication: You are a good communicator, you align stakeholders (e.g., clients, staff members) and make sure information is passed on throughout the business.
• Operations Excellence: You can figure out how to create processes & efficiencies & excellent experiences where none existed. You work with engineers effectively to build tools, or find and manage vendor relationships yourself.
• Ownership: 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 details. You can think on your own when something out of the box happens and you can problem solve complex issues without the need for close supervision.
• Experience using tech tools: You are tech savvy, and you are proficient using tech tools such as Google Spreadsheets, supplier onboarding tools eg Ariba, Stripe etc. 
• Collaboration/team player: You can work effectively with other people at Manara. You roll up your sleeves to support a team member when needed.
• Trustworthy: You have high integrity and you respect confidentiality, you can be trusted with fiduciary tasks, managing money, and ensuring transparency throughout the process.

Knock our socks off:

• English: You are fluent/native in English and can write in nearly perfect English.
• 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)

Location

We are a fully remote team, so you can be located anywhere. You will be required to overlap with our team from 8am-1pm California time each day Monday-Thursday.