laila90

Manara (YC W21) | Frontend Engineer | Remote anywhere | Full-time | www.manara.tech

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.

We are looking for a frontend engineer to help us build our next-gen platform. Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow designed for this region.

Apply at: https://manara.breezy.hr/p/1cebbb12d138

Great - thanks for sharing!

Hi, no worries, thanks for asking! Curious what you’re seeing are the salary bands in competitive low-cost locations?

We’re currently most familiar with the bands in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and UAE. What we’re seeing there varies widely, but can probably be thought of as breaking down into two separate scales/salary bands: those paid by local companies and by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily for affordability, and those paid by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily because they need strong engineers.

In the former, the band for junior engineers straight out of college with no work experience is ~$800-$1800/month. In the latter, it’s $2500-$4500/month. For senior engineers, in the former it’s around $5k/month and in the latter it’s $6k-$10k/month.

Of course startups sometimes seek strong talent but can’t afford the range, so they may pay on the lower end but make up for it with equity, career growth, etc.

Aww thank you! It makes us happy to work on this too. Interacting with talent in the region is just so heartwarming.

Totally - really appreciate you guys for flagging this.

Edit: edited this now in the text above!

oh yeah, we've heard about that recently from a Greek friend! Thankfully it seems like the Greek language is the only one in which our name has a weird meaning (at least so far), and hopefully it’s not offensive? Manara means “lighthouse” in Arabic. We did lots of user testing with various name options and this one was most positively perceived in Europe, North America, and MENA. Now we just need to get really great SEO to show up at the top of search results :)

Would diffidently reach out :)

Oh WOW thanks a lot!! We love it when we get multiple offers from the same company - extremely excited about our Repl.it placements :))

Would love to stay in touch, Azib! What's the name of your company?

Thank you! And totally, the region's entrepreneurship scene is growing quickly. Our current YC batch has at least 5 companies from MENA. We're excited to be a part of (and unlock) this growth.

Hi! Ahlan! Azul! Really appreciate your bringing these issues up.

Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions. For now we are managing payments for companies that hire remotely by wire transferring the funds ourselves. In other words, the companies send the money to our US entity and then we do the transfer. We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those? What do you think? Btw Pilot is also a YC company that initially planned to be a full-time remote work marketplace, but switched to facilitating payments because there was such a big need there.

You’re right of course that in North Africa (the Maghreb) many don’t speak Arabic nor identify as Arab. When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate. I wish there were a better word! We’ll keep iterating until we get it right.

PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)