Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering 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 ships to our cloud, to customers' clusters, and to machines that never touch the internet, which means a release has to be right before it leaves, because we often cannot see what happens after it does. You will own the automated test suite that gives us that confidence: what it covers, what runs on every pull request, and whether engineers believe it when it goes red. The interesting problems here are the ones that resist automation, including two clients editing the same document, a browser that went offline mid-edit and came back, a desktop app, and agents acting inside a workspace where the correct outcome is a range rather than a value. You will work with product and engineers in San Francisco and Hyderabad, and with community contributors whose pull requests arrive in public with varying amounts of test coverage. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the automated test suite for Plane's web and desktop clients, from framework design through what runs on every pull request to what runs before a release. - Build coverage for the parts that resist it: concurrent editing, offline and recovery, and agent actions where the correct result is a range rather than a single value. - Decide what gets tested and what does not. Coverage is a budget, and you spend it where a failure would reach a customer. - Keep the suite fast and trustworthy. A flaky test that engineers learn to ignore is worse than no test at all, and removing that habit is part of the job. - Test what customers actually run: Cloud, self-hosted, and versions months behind ours, across browsers and hardware we do not control. - Work daily with engineers and product across San Francisco and Hyderabad, and review the test coverage arriving with community pull requests. - Triage failures nobody else wants to own, separating a real defect from a script problem from an environment problem, and doing it again the next morning. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - You have built an automation framework, not only written tests inside one. Structure, fixtures, and test data are decisions you have made and then lived with. - You are fluent in Playwright or Cypress, and in TypeScript or JavaScript. Enough to debug a failure from a trace rather than by rerunning it. - You have made a flaky suite trustworthy again. Tell us what was flaking, what you changed, and how you knew it worked. - You test APIs as well as interfaces. REST endpoints, authentication, and getting an application into the state a test needs before it starts. - You have run suites in CI and cared how long they take. GitHub Actions or comparable, with a view on what belongs per commit and what belongs nightly. NICE TO HAVES - You have contributed to Plane, run it self-hosted, or maintained another open project people rely on. - You have tested real-time collaborative or offline-first applications, and you know why they break testing assumptions. - You have tested systems where AI agents act on real data, and you have thought about asserting on non-deterministic behavior. - You have worked with cross-browser, visual regression, or Electron desktop testing (BrowserStack, Applitools, or comparable). TECH - Testing: Playwright, TypeScript, GitHub Actions - What you will be testing: React and TypeScript client, ProseMirror based collaborative editor, Electron desktop app, local-first sync over WebSockets - Services behind it: Python/Django, Golang, Elixir, Node.js, 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 automated test suite for Plane's web and desktop clients, from framework design through what runs on every pull request to what runs before a release.
Build coverage for the parts that resist it: concurrent editing, offline and recovery, and agent actions where the correct result is a range rather than a single value.
Decide what gets tested and what does not. Coverage is a budget, and you spend it where a failure would reach a customer.
Keep the suite fast and trustworthy. A flaky test that engineers learn to ignore is worse than no test at all, and removing that habit is part of the job.
Test what customers actually run: Cloud, self-hosted, and versions months behind ours, across browsers and hardware we do not control.
Work daily with engineers and product across San Francisco and Hyderabad, and review the test coverage arriving with community pull requests.
Triage failures nobody else wants to own, separating a real defect from a script problem from an environment problem, and doing it again the next morning.
You have built an automation framework, not only written tests inside one. Structure, fixtures, and test data are decisions you have made and then lived with.
You are fluent in Playwright or Cypress, and in TypeScript or JavaScript. Enough to debug a failure from a trace rather than by rerunning it.
You have made a flaky suite trustworthy again. Tell us what was flaking, what you changed, and how you knew it worked.
You test APIs as well as interfaces. REST endpoints, authentication, and getting an application into the state a test needs before it starts.
You have run suites in CI and cared how long they take. GitHub Actions or comparable, with a view on what belongs per commit and what belongs nightly.
Testing: Playwright, TypeScript, GitHub Actions
What you will be testing: React and TypeScript client, ProseMirror based collaborative editor, Electron desktop app, local-first sync over WebSockets
Services behind it: Python/Django, Golang, Elixir, Node.js, 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
Every company says it is different. We will try evidence instead.

Nice-to-haves

You have contributed to Plane, run it self-hosted, or maintained another open project people rely on.
You have tested real-time collaborative or offline-first applications, and you know why they break testing assumptions.
You have tested systems where AI agents act on real data, and you have thought about asserting on non-deterministic behavior.
You have worked with cross-browser, visual regression, or Electron desktop testing (BrowserStack, Applitools, or comparable).

Application prep

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

Keywords to mirror

aitypescriptjavascriptrestreactpythongolangnode.jspostgresgraphqlawskubernetesfigma

Platform: ashby
Effort: quick