Founding Engineer (Full-Stack & Design)

At Manifest, we are building a consumer platform for discovering, understanding, and discussing prediction markets. Our goal is to transform fragmented markets, news, and social data into an intuitive, engaging product that helps people understand what is happening and why.

As our first engineering hire, you will work directly with the CEO and CTO to shape the core product. You will own features from initial user problems and interaction design through implementation, instrumentation, launch, and iteration.

This is a deeply hands-on, zero-to-one role. You will have meaningful influence over the user experience, product direction, architecture, codebase, and engineering culture. You should care as much about whether a feature is understandable as whether its underlying system is reliable.

We care more about what you have built than where you have worked or how many years of experience you have. Open-source work, side projects, design engineering work, and hackathon wins can all be strong signal.

Your initial focus

- Shape the core consumer experience: personalised feeds, market discovery, market pages, search, onboarding, profiles, and social interactions.

- Turn live market, news, and community data into clear, responsive, and compelling interfaces.

- Refine the product’s interaction patterns, user journey and lightweight design system across desktop and mobile.

- Contribute to data and infrastructure foundations needed to keep the experience fast, trustworthy, and reliable.

- Over time, you will help build recommendations, community features, notifications, AI-assisted research, and products for professional customers.

Our stack

- Python FastAPI (Gunicorn/Uvicorn), Pydantic, and Jinja

- TypeScript, React, Next.js, Figma, Svelte, Modern CSS (e.g. Tailwind)

- PostgreSQL and MongoDB

- Azure, GCP and Docker

- Kafka or comparable streaming infrastructure + WebSockets, webhooks, and SSE

We value sound product and engineering judgement more than exact tool matching. Experience with comparable technologies is welcome.

What you’ll do

- Take consumer features from loosely defined user problems through flows, prototypes, implementation, launch, and iteration.

- Build polished FastAPI/Jinja, and React/Next.js experiences across feeds, discovery, search, market pages, profiles, and social features.

- Make complex prediction-market information approachable through clear information architecture, visual hierarchy, and progressive disclosure.

- Design the complete experience (loading, empty, error, offline, stale-data, and reconnecting states)

- Build responsive, accessible interfaces that feel fast across mobile and desktop.

- Establish reusable components and interaction patterns without prematurely creating a heavy design system.

- Work with users and founders to test ideas, identify friction, and simplify product requirements.

- Develop real-time interfaces using WebSockets, SSE, or comparable technologies.

- Ship features end to end across FastAPI, React interfaces, data models, and infrastructure.

- Build pipelines for ingesting, normalising, reconciling, and monitoring market, news, and social data.

- Build recommendation, retrieval, ranking, and AI-assisted features where they measurably improve discovery or understanding.

- Share responsibility for reliability, security, observability, CI/CD, incident response, and production operations with the CTO.

What we’re looking for

- A record of shipping consumer-facing products or substantial features.

- The ability to work across backend APIs and data models, ideally using Python and FastAPI.

- Strong production experience with TypeScript, React, Jinja and modern frontend.

- Strong product and interaction-design judgement: you can turn an ambiguous problem into a clear, simple experience.

- Attention to the details that affect perceived quality, including responsiveness, latency, visual hierarchy, transitions, and edge states.

- An understanding of how consumer products drive activation, engagement, retention, and healthy recurring use.

- Experience building data-intensive or real-time interfaces where freshness and correctness matter.

- The ability to challenge a requirement, reduce its scope, and still deliver the intended user outcome.

- Comfort working directly with founders and users without a large product or design organisation around you.

- An AI-native development workflow in which agents improve your speed without replacing your responsibility for quality, testing, security, and architecture.

- High agency, curiosity, and clear written communication.

Nice to have

- Personalised feeds, content ranking, recommendation systems, or social graphs.

- Experience designing interfaces for complex or rapidly changing data.

- Product analytics, experimentation, growth loops, and notification systems.

- Accessibility, responsive design, performance optimisation, or design-system experience.

- AI-assisted consumer features, including retrieval, evaluation, citations, latency, and cost optimisation.

- Consumer fintech, media, news, social, or creator products.

- Prediction markets, sportsbooks, financial-market data, or FIX.

- Redis, Kafka, or comparable caching and streaming technologies.

- X/Twitter or other social-data integrations.

The Details

- Fully remote, with approximately two hours of overlap with UK working hours required, between 12:00pm and 5:30pm UK time (New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and other)

- Open to permanent employment or contractor arrangements

- Compensation structure, including equity, is flexible and open to discussion

No cover letters required. We move fast and reply to everyone. For any questions about the role, please contact [email protected]