Forward Deployed Engineer

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 Some of our largest customers do not need a demo, they need a working integration inside their own environment, sometimes one with no internet access. You will embed directly with these customers, write the code that connects Plane to their existing tools and workflows, and stay on the account until it works in production, not just in a sandbox. You will work alongside the customer's own engineers as much as you work with ours, and you will carry a problem from a whiteboard conversation to shipped code yourself. This role exists because our biggest deployments live or die on custom integration work that a generic support ticket cannot solve. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the end-to-end delivery of custom integrations for strategic customers, from the first technical conversation to code running in their production environment. - Build against APIs and infrastructure you did not design and cannot fully see, because you are integrating into someone else's stack, not your own. - Design the technical approach for a customer's specific use case, then write the code yourself rather than handing it to another team. - Work daily embedded with a customer's engineers and stakeholders, in their tools and on their timeline, while staying connected back to Plane's own product and engineering teams. - Decide when a customer's request is a one-off integration and when it is a real product gap worth escalating, and make the case either way. - Debug an integration failing on a customer's infrastructure that you cannot access directly, working from logs, screen shares, and a customer engineer's patience, because you will not always get a repro environment. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - You have shipped production code that talks to real customer systems, and you can walk us through one integration that broke and what you did about it. - You are proficient in Python and comfortable with API design and integration work, including auth flows, webhooks, and the messy edges of someone else's documentation. - You have worked embedded with a customer or a similarly demanding internal stakeholder, and you know the difference between a request and the actual problem behind it. - You can hold a technical conversation with both a customer's engineers and their executives, in the same meeting, without losing either. - You are comfortable owning a project with a real deadline and no clear handoff, because on this team, you are the handoff. NICE TO HAVES - You have contributed to Plane, run it self-hosted, or maintained another open project people rely on. - You have shipped software into regulated or isolated environments: banking, defense, healthcare, or air-gapped anything. - You have built systems where AI agents act on real data, and you have opinions about state, permissions, and audit trails. - You have worked in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or professional services engineering role before. TECH - Backend: Python/Django, Golang, Node.js, Postgres, Redis - Messaging: RabbitMQ, Kafka - Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Rancher, self-hosted deployment via Docker and Helm - Integration: REST and webhook-based APIs, SSO and identity federation - 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.