<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>About Manifest Global</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility - connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans <strong>Cialfo</strong> (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), <strong>BridgeU</strong> (university guidance for international schools globally), <strong>Kaaiser</strong> (trusted study abroad counseling across India and Southeast Asia), and <strong>Explore</strong> (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $80M raised. Still early.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>About This Role</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Most backend roles ask you to ship endpoints and migrations. This one asks you to ship those <em>and</em> extend the platform that lets the rest of the engineering team - and the AI agents working alongside them - ship them too. That platform already exists. Shared conventions, the skills library, safe contribution zones, spec-to-endpoint workflows, AI-agent infrastructure powering Saige and Explore - all live, all in production, all being used today. You'll own its next chapter: deepening it, scaling it, and raising the ceiling on what each engineer can do without re-deriving the same patterns.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">If the most interesting question in your career right now is <em>"how do I build leverage for a team, not just output for myself?"</em> - keep reading.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>What will you own</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">You own the backend - not just the code you write, but the system that lets everyone around you contribute to it. That means shipping production Rails services, designing APIs other teams build against, and owning the data layer end to end. And it means extending the workflows, conventions, and guardrails that let QEs generate test scaffolds independently, PMs and analysts ship config and feature-flag changes safely, and AI agents operate inside the codebase reliably.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The measure of success here is not your personal output. It is how much the team around you can do because of what you built.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Concretely, that looks like:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Shared AI conventions</strong> that keep tooling output consistent across the codebase - for backend code generation, schema changes, and migrations - whoever or whatever is driving</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>A backend skills library</strong> that encodes Rails patterns, service contracts, domain models, and query patterns into workflows anyone on the team can invoke</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Safe zones and guardrails</strong> that let PMs and analysts ship config changes, feature flags, and scoped data changes without creating engineering cleanup</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Spec-to-endpoint and ticket-to-migration workflows</strong> that compress the path from intent to working backend code</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>AI-agent backend infrastructure</strong> - runtimes, tool-calling layers, retrieval pipelines, evals - that powers Saige, Explore, and what comes next, and scales with each new feature</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>A feedback loop</strong> with engineers, QEs, and PMs building against the platform every day - you hear where things break and you fix them</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>What success looks like</strong></span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>30 days.</strong> You've mapped the existing platform, the conventions, the skills library, and the AI workflows the team is already using. You know where they're sharpest, where they're starting to bend under load, and where the next wave of investment should go.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>90 days.</strong> You've shipped meaningful additions to the skills library, tightened conventions where they were drifting, and closed gaps the team has been working around. Other engineers are reaching for your work instead of writing from scratch.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>6 months.</strong> The backend platform is materially more capable than when you joined. Saige and Explore's AI surfaces hold up under heavier production load because of infrastructure decisions you made. PMs and analysts are shipping more inside safe zones, with less cleanup. The engineers and agents building against the platform move faster - and they know why.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>About You</strong></span></p>
<h3><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Qualifications</span></h3>
<ul>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience</span></li>
</ul>
<p><strong><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Experience</span></strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">5+ years of backend engineering experience on production systems</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Strong production <strong>Rails</strong> experience - services you've owned and shipped, not contributed to at the margins</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Real fluency with <strong>PostgreSQL or MySQL</strong>, including query optimization at scale</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Experience designing and maintaining <strong>RESTful APIs</strong> that other teams build against</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Daily fluency with <strong>AI-assisted coding tools</strong> (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) - and a track record of making them work consistently for other people, not just yourself</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The instinct to treat a non-engineer touching your platform as a capability to design for, not a risk to manage</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Strong nice-to-haves</strong></span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Hands-on <strong>AI/LLM backend work</strong> - retrieval pipelines, agent runtimes, tool-calling, evals, prompt versioning</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Developer experience</strong> or <strong>platform engineering</strong> background - internal SDKs, shared libraries, opinionated documentation</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Cloud experience (<strong>AWS, Azure, GCP</strong>) and serious testing discipline (<strong>RSpec, Capybara</strong>)</span></li>
<li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Evidence of cross-functional thinking - something you built that made a non-engineer's life easier</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Why Manifest</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">We're building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility - the rails that move students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Cialfo is in 2,000+ schools. Explore is trusted by 1,000+ universities. BridgeU runs across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East. Kaaiser has guided students across India and Southeast Asia since 1997.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The opportunity is real. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><strong>$80M raised</strong> from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg. Still early.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The team has already built the infrastructure for AI-native engineering - shared conventions, a live skills library, AI-assisted workflows across engineering, QE, product, and design. Saige is in production. Explore's AI capabilities are in production. This isn't an aspiration we're hiring you to bring to life. It's an operating system we're hiring you to extend, scale, and make permanent.</span></p>
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