Published in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has two authors: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These two men were intellectuals from Germany who, in 1847, took part in the first meeting of the Congress of the League of the Just in London. This organisation then changed its name to the Communist League and Marx and Engels were commissioned to write down the views, aims and "tendencies" of this League for dissemination across Europe, as mentioned in the Preamble to the text.
Both Marx and Engels were ideally suited to this purpose. Marx, for example, studied philosophy at university before becoming a journalist, while Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer, had witnessed first-hand the exploitation of the working classes while employed in his father's factories.
Marx and Engels possessed neither an official title nor role of any great importance (they were not politicians, for example), but, working together, they had the writing ability and the ideological understanding necessary to produce such a document.
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