Legal Architect , NY

Location

New York, NY

Level

Senior

Reports To

Leadership

Salary Range

$160k - $190k

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.

You’ll be working directly with our product and engineering teams to shape how AI reasons about law. Our team moves fast, ships constantly, and isn’t precious about breaking things to build better ones. We’re equal parts lawyers‑who‑code and engineers‑who‑get‑law, all obsessed with making legal work less painful.

You’re a practicing attorney with 4-8 years of experience who’s always been the person at your firm pushing for better tools and smarter processes. Maybe you built spreadsheet macros to automate document review, or convinced partners to try new legal tech, or shipped a side project that other lawyers actually use. You understand legal work deeply enough to know what can be systematized and what requires human judgment.

You have strong technical instincts even if you don’t code professionally. You’re comfortable in technical discussions and can hold your own with engineers when debating product architecture. Most importantly, you think in systems and processes, not just legal precedent.

This isn’t your typical legal role. As our Legal Architect, you’re the bridge between how law actually works and how we teach our AI to work with it. You’ll spend your days writing prompts that help LLMs understand complex legal reasoning, designing workflows that mirror how great lawyers think, and building the logical frameworks that power our platform. Think of yourself as a product manager for legal AI — except you actually practiced law and know where the real complexity lies.

You’ll be the person who figures out how to break down a securities offering into discrete, automatable steps, or how to teach our system to spot the edge cases in employment agreements that junior associates always miss. This role exists because building AI for lawyers requires someone who’s been in the trenches, knows what good legal work looks like, and can translate that into product requirements that actually matter.

The impact is immediate and measurable. Every workflow you design, every prompt you refine, every logical framework you build directly affects how dozens of lawyers use our platform. You’re not supporting the business — you are the business, helping us solve problems that the legal industry has accepted as unsolvable.

You’re energized by building things that don’t exist yet rather than perfecting things that do. You probably got frustrated by inefficient processes at your law firm and actually did something about it instead of just complaining. You’re comfortable being wrong, iterating quickly, and shipping imperfect solutions that you can improve over time. You think like a lawyer but aren’t constrained by how lawyers traditionally do things.

You’re also genuinely curious about how AI works and excited about its potential to change legal practice. You don’t need to be a machine learning expert, but you should be someone who reads about AI developments, experiments with new tools, and thinks critically about where the technology is heading.

If you love the prestige and tradition of legal practice more than solving actual problems,…