Software Engineer, Frontend (React)

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, so state lives in the browser, syncs when the network allows, and has to stay correct when two people edit the same document at once or when a customer's cluster never touches the internet. Agents now act inside those same workspaces, which means the interface has to render a change made by a machine as legibly as one made by a colleague. You will own frontend surfaces across 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. You will 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 - Own user-facing surfaces from design review through component work to rollout, starting with scoped ones and taking on larger ones as you learn the client. - Extend the local-first sync and collaborative editing layer alongside the engineers who built it: serialization, conflict resolution, and what the interface does when the two disagree. - Keep dense views fast. Virtualization, memoization, and render paths in workspaces holding tens of thousands of issues are yours to profile and fix. - Make Plane usable offline and on slow networks with Service Workers and IndexedDB, including for customers whose machines never reach the internet. - Work daily with designers and backend engineers across San Francisco and Hyderabad, and review community pull requests from contributors you will never meet. - Chase visual and behavioral bugs you cannot reproduce, across browsers, screen sizes, and self-hosted versions running months behind ours. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - You have shipped React and TypeScript to production. Point us to something you built, and tell us one decision in it you would make differently now. - You reason about state, not just hooks. You know when state belongs local, when it belongs global, and how reactivity moves through an app (MobX, Redux, Zustand, or similar). - You write CSS with intent. Responsive, themeable interfaces in Tailwind or a comparable system, and an eye that catches a misaligned element before review does. - You have worked inside a shared component library. You know what breaks when a component is used in ways its author did not plan for. NICE TO HAVES - You have made a slow interface fast, and you can quote the measurement. - You have contributed to Plane, run it self-hosted, or maintained another open project people rely on. - You have worked inside a rich-text editor framework (ProseMirror, CodeMirror, Lexical, Tiptap) rather than only on top of one. - You have built offline-first or CRDT-backed applications and have opinions about conflict resolution. - You have built interfaces where AI agents act on real data, and you have thought about how to show authorship and authority. TECH - Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MobX, React Router - Editing and sync: ProseMirror based editor, local-first sync, Service Workers, IndexedDB - Desktop: Electron - Build and design system: Vite, Rolldown, internal React component library - Services you will call: Python/Django, Golang, Elixir, Postgres, Redis, public REST and GraphQL APIs - 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.