Design Engineer

About Manifest

Manifest OS is an AI-native company on a mission to replace the billable hour and make legal services more accessible for American businesses and consumers. We power the next generation of AI-native law firms with one unified global brand, a proprietary technology platform, and a centralized back office — enabling lawyers to eliminate the administrative burden and focus on delivering exceptional outcomes for their clients. Manifest OS has raised a $60M Series A from Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, First Round, and Quiet Capital.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Design Engineer to help build the legal tech platform powering the next generation of AI-native law firms. You care as much about how software feels as how it works. You’ll own the development of secure client portals and enterprise-grade systems - from architecture to production.

This opportunity is ideal for engineers who want broad scope, high ownership and move nimbly across lanes. You’ll work across AI systems architecture and full-stack engineering - eval systems, retrieval, agent orchestration, and optimization, alongside the APIs, data models, and systems that power the core platform.

This is an in-person role - you’ll be on-site at our NYC office 5 days a week.

What You’ll Do

Design System Engineering

• Evolve the design system into scalable components and tokens that make every project fast to ship and beautiful by default, whether a person or an agent is building it.
• Spot patterns that keep recurring across the platform, and promote them into tested, documented primitives that designers and engineers can compose without reinventing.
• Build the guardrails that keep the product on-system as it scales, including token linting, visual regression testing, and component documentation that AI coding tools can read and follow.

Frontend Architecture

• Translate the design system into components and tokens that make the next screen fast to ship and beautiful by default, by a person or an agent
• Partner with design on what AI-native interfaces should be in a high-stakes domain: progressive disclosure, streaming states, and the patterns nobody’s figured out yet
• Define the contracts between backend and UI - data fetching, caching, state boundaries, the choices that make the design hold up against real data
• Own the screens clients and attorneys live in, where a well-set page turns a dreaded process into one that actually feels good to use
• Build loading, empty, error, partial, and permission-restricted states as first-class parts of every feature, so nothing ships with only the happy path.
• Treat accessibility, performance, and failure recovery as acceptance criteria, not polish. A failed document upload the night before a filing deadline should tell the user exactly what happened and what to do next.

Product Engineering

• Own end-to-end features across our legal tech platform - client portals, case management, and the workflows lawyers and clients depend on daily
• Design production-grade APIs, data models, and permission systems for a regulated, high-trust domain

Agent Platform

• Eval systems, retrieval, and agent orchestration - building the infrastructure that measures and improves how our AI agents perform
• Harness engineering - building the tooling and guardrails that let the rest of the company build securely, reliably, and self-serve

What We’re Looking For

Must-haves:

• 7+ years building production software, with demonstrated depth in at least one area (backend systems, infra, ML/AI systems, frontend or similar)
• Built or meaningfully shaped a production design system, including component APIs, tokens, theming, and documentation, that other engineers adopted and shipped with
• Proven track record delivering features that produce measurable business outcomes
• Comfort with relational database design and data modeling
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on a major cloud platform
• Fluent with AI coding tools as a core part of your daily workflow
• A track record of self-teaching your way into unfamiliar systems and shipping there
• First-principles and systems thinking: you can reason about a system you didn’t build, from the database up through the API to the product surface
• Familiarity with our stack - TypeScript, React, GCP, PostgreSQL

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience making a design system legible to AI coding tools, through machine-rea…