Senior Staff Engineer, Frontend at Plane

Job description

ABOUT PLANE Plane's mission is to build the infrastructure the world's work runs on. Every organization runs on three things: the projects it's driving, the knowledge it keeps, and the requests it fields. Plane brings all three into one open, adaptable platform: simple enough for any team to adopt, dependable enough for organizations to build on. And we are building it for a future where humans and AI agents do that work together. Plane began in public on GitHub at the end of 2022. Since then it has grown into a work management platform used by teams around the world: 55,000+ stars, 5,000+ forks, and a contributor community that reads our code and files our issues. Organizations run Plane as a managed Cloud service, on their own infrastructure, or inside fully isolated environments. Building in the open keeps us close to users and raises the standard for everything we ship. Plane is the #1 work infrastructure in aerospace, defense, financial services, and other regulated industries: organizations whose requirements for control, auditability, and data residency rule most software out. When the strictest buyers pick a system of record, that choice means something. Adoption is growing fastest on Plane Cloud and in sovereign clouds, deployments that keep everything inside a country's own borders and rules. Plane is backed by top investors and built across San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad. We work in tightly knit teams, stay close to users, and care about the visible product as much as the unglamorous details that make software dependable. People own problems end to end, and we add process only when it helps the work. HUMANS AND AGENTS We believe the next decade of work will be done by humans and AI agents together. Not agents replacing people, and not a chat window bolted onto software built for humans clicking around, but both working in one system of action, where an agent's work is as visible and as accountable as a person's. Most software treats AI as a feature. We treat agents as a kind of worker, and that changes what the system underneath has to be. Agents are only as good as the context they can see and the state they are allowed to change, so shared context, explicit state, durable history, and accountable action are not items on our roadmap. They are the product. Plane is built so that when an agent acts, the humans responsible can see what happened, why, and on whose authority, and the record survives. This is what the infrastructure is for: making the future where humans and agents work together useful, legible, and fully within the organization's control. Every role at Plane is some part of building that. ABOUT THE ROLE Plane's client is local-first and collaborative, which means state lives in the browser, moves over WebSockets to an Elixir sync service, survives the network going away, and has to resolve what happens when two people edit the same document at once. Agents now edit alongside those people, so the same client has to make a machine's change as legible and as attributable as a colleague's. This is an individual contributor role that owns that architecture: where the sync boundary sits, what the design system guarantees to every team building on it, and what the performance and accessibility bar is for views holding tens of thousands of issues. You will work with the Elixir and Django teams, with design, and with the frontend engineers in San Francisco and Hyderabad whose work you will review and whose standards you will help write. All of it happens in a public repository, so your architectural decisions get read, questioned, and depended on by people outside the company. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the architecture of Plane's frontend: how state moves through the client, where the boundary with the Elixir sync service sits, and what the shared component library guarantees to every team building on it. - Own real-time collaborative editing end to end, including transport, offline behavior, serialization, and what the interface does when two edits cannot both be right. - Set the performance and accessibility bar for dense views and hold the product to it. Rendering paths, memory, and bundle size in workspaces holding tens of thousands of issues. - Decide how agent activity appears in the interface, so that a change made by a machine carries its authority and its history as visibly as one made by a person. - Raise the level of the frontend engineers around you in San Francisco and Hyderabad, through design review, code review, and standards that hold after you stop pushing them. - Carry migrations through a public codebase, where community contributors and self-hosted customers running months-old versions all feel the change, and some of them will tell you so in an issue thread. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - You have eight or more years building web applications, and you owned the architecture of the recent ones. Not eight years of shipping features inside someone else's design. - You are expert in TypeScript and React. You can take a rendering problem down to the browser: reconciliation, memory, and paint, with measurements rather than instinct. - You have owned a design system other teams depended on. Versioning, deprecation, and what happens when a component is used in ways you did not plan for. - You have shipped real-time collaborative editing to production. CRDTs, operational transformation, or a comparable approach, including the conflict cases that arrive afterwards. - You have raised the level of engineers around you. Mentoring, review, and standards that outlasted your attention. NICE TO HAVES - You have worked inside a rich-text editor framework (ProseMirror, Tiptap, Lexical) rather than only on top of one. - You read Elixir, Go, or Python well enough to follow a bug across the boundary instead of handing it off. - You have built and shipped an Electron desktop application, including packaging and updates. - You have maintained an open project with outside contributors, where the review queue and the roadmap were both public. TECH - Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MobX - Editing and collaboration: ProseMirror based editor, WebSocket sync engine backed by Elixir, offline support - Desktop: Electron - Build and design system: Vite, Rolldown, shared React component library used across the product - Services you will call: Python/Django, Golang, Elixir, Postgres, Redis, public REST and GraphQL APIs - Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Rancher - Observability: Datadog, Sentry - Everyday tools: GitHub, Plane (yes, we run on it), Figma, Slack WHY PLANE? Every company says it is different. We will try evidence instead. The scope is real. We are a passion team serving companies of every size, including some of the largest in the world. Something you ship this month will run inside a Fortune 500 company and a 50-person startup in the same week, and you will hear from both. The constraints make you better. Plane runs in our cloud, in customers' clouds, and on machines that will never touch the internet. Much of the work happens in the open, where the issues, the fixes, and the roadmap conversations are public. Building software that survives all of that is harder than building an ordinary SaaS product, and it is a better education than most companies can offer. The people-and-agents future is being built here, in production. We think humans and AI agents will share one system of action for work. We are building that system now, for customers who already depend on it, and you will work on that problem directly whatever your role. Your name is on the work. The teams are deeply connected enough that credit and responsibility both find you fast. That is some pressure. Mostly it is the fun part. If that sounds like your kind of place, we would like to meet you. Plane is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

Requirements

Must-haves

This is what the infrastructure is for: making the future where humans and agents work together useful, legible, and fully within the organization's control. Every role at Plane is some part of building that.
Own the architecture of Plane's frontend: how state moves through the client, where the boundary with the Elixir sync service sits, and what the shared component library guarantees to every team building on it.
Own real-time collaborative editing end to end, including transport, offline behavior, serialization, and what the interface does when two edits cannot both be right.
Set the performance and accessibility bar for dense views and hold the product to it. Rendering paths, memory, and bundle size in workspaces holding tens of thousands of issues.
Decide how agent activity appears in the interface, so that a change made by a machine carries its authority and its history as visibly as one made by a person.
Raise the level of the frontend engineers around you in San Francisco and Hyderabad, through design review, code review, and standards that hold after you stop pushing them.
Carry migrations through a public codebase, where community contributors and self-hosted customers running months-old versions all feel the change, and some of them will tell you so in an issue thread.
You have eight or more years building web applications, and you owned the architecture of the recent ones. Not eight years of shipping features inside someone else's design.
You are expert in TypeScript and React. You can take a rendering problem down to the browser: reconciliation, memory, and paint, with measurements rather than instinct.
You have owned a design system other teams depended on. Versioning, deprecation, and what happens when a component is used in ways you did not plan for.
You have shipped real-time collaborative editing to production. CRDTs, operational transformation, or a comparable approach, including the conflict cases that arrive afterwards.
You have raised the level of engineers around you. Mentoring, review, and standards that outlasted your attention.
Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MobX
Editing and collaboration: ProseMirror based editor, WebSocket sync engine backed by Elixir, offline support
Desktop: Electron
Build and design system: Vite, Rolldown, shared React component library used across the product
Services you will call: Python/Django, Golang, Elixir, Postgres, Redis, public REST and GraphQL APIs
Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Rancher
Observability: Datadog, Sentry
Everyday tools: GitHub, Plane (yes, we run on it), Figma, Slack

Nice-to-haves

You have worked inside a rich-text editor framework (ProseMirror, Tiptap, Lexical) rather than only on top of one.
You read Elixir, Go, or Python well enough to follow a bug across the boundary instead of handing it off.
You have built and shipped an Electron desktop application, including packaging and updates.
You have maintained an open project with outside contributors, where the review queue and the roadmap were both public.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aidesign systemaccessibilitytypescriptreactgopythongolangpostgresrestgraphqlawskubernetesfigma

Platform: ashby
Effort: quick