Principal Engineer, Frontend

About the job

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: 58,000+ 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. State lives in the browser and syncs when the network allows. It has to stay correct when two people edit the same document at once, and when a customer's cluster never touches the internet at all. Agents now act inside those same workspaces, so the interface has to show a change made by a machine as clearly as one made by a colleague. You will own the frontend of that client: the dense views that hold tens of thousands of issues, the collaborative editor, the offline and caching layer under both, and the design system components the rest of the product is built from. Day to day you work with designers, product, and backend engineers in San Francisco and Hyderabad, and your commits land in a public repository where contributors read them.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Take Plane's frontend to real-time and local-first across work items, boards, documents, and other core product surfaces.

- Own client-side state, synchronization, caching, offline behavior, and conflict resolution.

- Own frontend performance in large workspaces: rendering, memory usage, load times, and interaction latency.

- Set frontend architecture and engineering standards, and review the designs and implementations that carry the most risk.

- Work with product, design, and backend teams to ship features that hold up from the API to the screen.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with React, TypeScript, and frontend architecture at scale.

- You have built real-time applications using WebSockets, subscriptions, or event-driven architectures.

- You have worked on local-first problems: client-side persistence, synchronization, caching, and offline behavior.

- You have found and fixed frontend performance problems in complex, data-heavy applications.

- You understand state management and browser architecture, and you design frontend systems other people can maintain.

NICE TO HAVES

- You have built collaborative or multi-user applications with concurrent updates.

- You have worked with CRDTs, OT, or other synchronization and conflict-resolution approaches.

- You have built dense products such as project management tools, editors, spreadsheets, or design tools.

- You have used IndexedDB, Service Workers, virtualization, Web Workers, or similar browser technologies.

- You have contributed to or maintained large open-source applications.

TECH

- Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MobX, React Router

- Real-time and local-first: WebSockets, IndexedDB, Service Workers, client-side synchronization

- Editing: ProseMirror-based editor

- Platform: Electron, Vite, Rolldown, internal React component library

- Backend and observability: Python/Django, Golang, Postgres, Redis, REST/GraphQL, Datadog, Sentry

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.