Junior 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

Our product team moves fast to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. The team includes senior designers who think in systems and engineers who obsess over pixel-perfect implementations. We ship constantly, iterate quickly, and care deeply about crafting experiences that feel magical yet intuitive.

Ideal experience

You have 1-3 years of experience that spans design and development, whether from frontend roles where you drove visual decisions, product design positions where you also wrote code, or personal projects that showcase both skills. Your portfolio demonstrates strong visual taste — clean layouts, thoughtful typography, smooth animations — but also shows working prototypes and production code.

You're fluent in modern frontend development with React and TypeScript, comfortable with styling frameworks like Tailwind, and can build responsive, accessible interfaces. More importantly, you understand design fundamentals: you know why certain spacing feels wrong, how typography hierarchy guides attention, and when micro-interactions enhance rather than distract from the core experience.

You thrive in ambiguous environments where you need to go from a rough concept to a working prototype without detailed specifications. You've built things that people actually use, whether through work, side projects, or contributions to open source. You can look at any interface — ours or a competitor's — and articulate specific improvements with both design reasoning and technical feasibility in mind.

What You'll Own

We're looking for someone who refuses to be boxed into traditional roles — someone who designs in the browser and thinks in both components and user flows. This role exists because we believe the future of product development belongs to people who can seamlessly move between design thinking and implementation, crafting experiences that would be impossible if design and engineering were siloed.

You'll be responsible for the visual quality and interaction design of our customer-facing AI features, working directly in code to prototype new concepts and ship polished interfaces. This isn't about following specs or translating designs — it's about owning the end-to-end experience from initial idea to production code. You'll help establish our visual identity and interaction patterns as we scale, making decisions that will influence how thousands of users experience AI.

The opportunity is unique: join at a stage where your taste and technical skills can fundamentally shape the product. You'll work alongside senior team members who respect both sides of your skillset and will help you grow into a world-class design engineer.

This for you if

You're someone who gets energized by the intersection of aesthetics and logic, who finds equal satisfaction in a perfectly balanced layout and elegantly structured code. You have strong opinions about user experience backed by the technical skills to implement your vision. You're comfortable with ambiguity and enjoy the creative problem-solving that comes with early-stage product development.

You work well in collaborative environments but don't need constant direction. You can take a rough product idea and independently explore different approaches, presenting options with clear rationale for your recommendations. You care deeply about craft and take pride in shipping work that feels polished and intentional, even under tight deadlines.

Not for you if

This role isn't suitable if you strongly prefer to work exclusively in design tools or if you need detailed specifications before you can start building. If you're uncomfortable with the ambiguity of early-stage product development or prefer to focus on either pure design or pure engineering, you'll likely find this role frustrating.