Senior Staff Engineer, Frontend

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• You have eight or more years building web applications, and you owned the architecture of the recent ones.
• 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.
• You have shipped real-time collaborative editing to production.
• You have raised the level of engineers around you.

Requirements

• Not eight years of shipping features inside someone else's design.
• Versioning, deprecation, and what happens when a component is used in ways you did not plan for.
• CRDTs, operational transformation, or a comparable approach, including the conflict cases that arrive afterwards.
• 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?

• The scope is real. We are a passion team serving companies of every size, including some of the largest in the world.
• The constraints make you better. Plane runs in our cloud, in customers' clouds, and on machines that will never touch the internet.
• 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.
• Your name is on the work. The teams are deeply connected enough that credit and responsibility both find you fast.