Senior 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. Backed by leading venture investors, Manifest O.S. is scaling rapidly.

About the team

You'll be joining a small but ambitious product team that's obsessed with building AI experiences that feel magical, not clunky. We believe that great AI products aren't just about the underlying models — they're about creating interfaces that make complex capabilities feel intuitive and delightful. The team includes product designers, engineers, and researchers who collaborate closely and move fast while maintaining an uncompromising bar for quality.

Ideal experience

You have 6+ years of experience where you've worn both design and engineering hats, shipping meaningful product features that required both visual design sensibility and deep technical implementation. You've built design systems from scratch or evolved them significantly, thinking through component APIs, design token architecture, and how to make good design scale across a team. Your portfolio shows shipped work — not just pretty mockups, but features that real users have interacted with and loved.

You're fluent in React and TypeScript, with strong opinions about component architecture and state management. You've probably built complex interactive components, dealt with performance optimization for rich interfaces, and understand the tradeoffs between flexibility and consistency in design systems. You care deeply about motion design and micro-interactions, knowing when a 200ms ease-out makes the difference between an interface that feels mechanical and one that feels alive.

You've mentored other designers or engineers on craft, helping them see details they missed and understand why small things matter. You might have experience with accessibility, advanced animation libraries like Framer Motion or GSAP, or building tools that help other designers and engineers work more effectively. Bonus points if you've worked on AI products before and understand the unique challenges of designing for non-deterministic, streaming, or agentic interfaces.

What You'll Own

We're looking for someone who lives at the intersection of design and engineering — someone who can see a subtle animation detail that would make an interaction feel more natural, and then build it themselves. As our Senior Design Engineer, you'll own the craft bar for our entire product experience, from the micro-interactions that make AI responses feel alive to the design systems that let us ship consistently beautiful features at speed.

This role exists because we're building interfaces that don't have established patterns yet — streaming AI conversations, agentic workflows, novel ways to manipulate and interact with AI-generated content. We need someone who can invent these patterns, prototype them quickly, and then build the systems that let the rest of the team implement them without compromising on quality. You'll be the bridge between our ambitious design vision and the reality of shipping polished product experiences that users love.

This for you if

You're someone who notices when a loading state feels awkward, when spacing feels slightly off, or when an animation doesn't quite match the personality of the product — and you have the skills to fix these things yourself. You get energized by solving novel interface challenges and creating patterns that other people can build on top of. You care about the craft of building great software, but you're also pragmatic about shipping and understand that perfect is the enemy of good.

You work well in a fast-moving environment where requirements change and new challenges emerge regularly. You're comfortable being the go-to person for craft questions and enjoy helping others level up their skills. You probably have strong opinions about design tools, component architecture, and interaction patterns, but you're also curious and open to new approaches when they serve the user better.

Not for you if

This role isn't for someone who prefers to stay purely in design or purely in engineering — you'll need to excel at both and enjoy the intersection. If you're looking for a management track or want to focus primarily on user research and product strategy rather than craft and implementation, this probably isn't the right fit. We're also not looking for someone who just wants to build the design system once and move on — this is an ongoing craft leadership role that requires continuous attention to quality and evolution of standards.