Principal Engineer, Frontend

🏢 About Plane

Plane's mission is to build the open-source infrastructure modern work runs on. Launched in public on GitHub in 2022, Plane has grown into one of the world's most popular open-source platforms with over 58,000 stars and 5,000 forks. Organizations deploy Plane across managed Cloud, sovereign enterprise clouds, and isolated air-gapped environments, particularly across aerospace, defense, and financial services. Plane is backed by premier global investors and built across San Francisco, London, and Hyderabad.

🎯 The Role

Plane's client is local-first: state resides in the browser and synchronizes continuously when network connectivity allows. As Principal Engineer, Frontend, you will own the frontend of this client: the high-density project boards rendering tens of thousands of issues, the real-time collaborative document editor, and the underlying caching and conflict-resolution layers.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• React
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• MobX
• WebSockets, IndexedDB, Service Workers
• ProseMirror editor foundation
• Electron & Vite

💼 What You'll Do

• Evolve Plane's client into a high-performance, local-first architecture across boards, pages, and items.
• Own client-side state management, synchronization protocols, caching, and conflict resolution.
• Optimize memory consumption, DOM virtualization, and rendering performance for large workspaces.
• Establish frontend architectural patterns and lead technical design reviews.
• Ship code openly on GitHub, collaborating with a distributed engineering team.

✅ What You'll Need

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with deep specialization in frontend architectures.
• Experience building real-time applications with event-driven or WebSocket architectures.
• Deep understanding of local-first patterns, offline behavior, and browser persistence (IndexedDB).
• Proven ability to profile and eliminate complex performance bottlenecks.
• Clear architectural communication and dedication to developer experience.

🌟 Nice to Have

• Experience building multi-user collaborative editors (CRDTs or Operational Transformation).
• Contributions to prominent open-source repositories.
• Experience with Web Workers, virtualization, or desktop wrappers like Electron.