Senior Legal Architect New York, NY

Senior Legal Architect

Location

New York, NY

Level

Senior Manager

Reports To

Head of Product

Salary Range

$190k - $230k

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 Legal Architecture team is the connective tissue between world-class legal practice and cutting-edge AI product development. Currently a small but growing function, we're the lawyers who don't just understand the law — we understand how to encode legal reasoning into systems that can serve thousands of firms. We work hand-in-hand with engineering, product, and design to ensure our platform doesn't just automate legal work, but elevates it. The team values intellectual rigor, practical judgment, and the ability to translate complex legal concepts into product requirements that actually ship.

What We're Looking For

You're a seasoned lawyer who has already started the journey from practice to product. You spent 10+ years developing real legal expertise — likely as a partner or partner-track attorney at a respected firm, or leading a significant in-house legal function where you owned complex, high-stakes work. But you've also crossed the bridge into legal technology, whether by shipping legal tech products, leading AI initiatives at your firm, or joining an early-stage legal tech company where you learned how legal expertise translates into software.You think like a product person while maintaining the rigor of an expert practitioner. You can decompose complex legal workflows into user stories, have strong opinions about how to evaluate AI-generated legal content, and understand the difference between legal work that can be automated versus work that requires human judgment. You've collaborated with technical teams before and know how to be a true design partner — not just answering legal questions, but helping shape the product strategy based on deep understanding of how lawyers actually work.

What You'll Do

This is a founding role in building the legal intelligence that powers Manifest's platform. As our Senior Legal Architect, you'll own the systematic thinking that makes our AI genuinely useful to practicing lawyers — not just impressive in demos. You'll define how we structure legal knowledge across practice areas, establish the evaluation frameworks that ensure our outputs meet the bar real lawyers demand, and create the playbook for expanding into new legal verticals with confidence and speed.You'll be in the room for the biggest product decisions, working directly with founders and product leadership to shape our roadmap based on deep legal insight. This isn't a traditional legal role — you're building the future of legal practice by ensuring our AI understands law the way expert practitioners do. The impact is immediate and measurable: the taxonomies you create, the evaluation standards you set, and the legal partnerships you cultivate directly determine whether we ship features that lawyers trust and adopt.As we scale, you'll grow and mentor a team of Legal Architects, establishing the discipline and standards that will define how legal expertise gets built into AI systems. This is the opportunity to be the legal mind behind a platform that could reshape how law is practiced, while building a new type of role that bridges the best of legal practice and product development.

This For You If

You're energized by the intersection of legal expertise and product development, and you see the massive opportunity to reshape how law is practiced through AI. You're comfortable being the legal expert in a room full of engineers and product managers, but you're equally comfortable learning their language and thinking in their frameworks. You have strong opinions about legal quality and accuracy, but you're pragmatic about shipping products that improve over time rather than waiting for perfection.You thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you need to build the playbook as you go. You're intellectually curious about how AI systems work and eager to learn how to make them better at legal reasoning. You value both the rigor of expert legal practice and the speed and impact of startup culture.

Not For You If

If you're looking for a traditional legal role where you practice law in familiar ways, this isn't it. This role requires genuine excitement about product development and technology — if you see AI as a threat to legal practice rather than an opportunity to elevate it, you won't enjoy the work. You also won't be successful if you need extensive structure and defined processes to be productive, since you'll be building many of those systems yourself in a rapidly evolving startup environment.