Principal Engineer, Frontend
Principal frontend engineer owning Plane's local-first, real-time client: client-side state, sync, caching, offline/conflict handling, and performance for dense views with tens of thousands of issues, plus a collaborative ProseMirror editor and design system. Built with React, TypeScript, WebSockets, and browser storage APIs.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- India
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Frontend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with React, TypeScript, and frontend architecture at scale
- Built real-time applications using WebSockets, subscriptions, or event-driven architectures
- Worked on local-first problems: client-side persistence, synchronization, caching, and offline behavior
- Found and fixed frontend performance problems in complex, data-heavy applications
- Understands state management and browser architecture, and designs frontend systems others can maintain
Nice to have
- Built collaborative or multi-user applications with concurrent updates
- Worked with CRDTs, OT, or other synchronization and conflict-resolution approaches
- Built dense products such as project management tools, editors, spreadsheets, or design tools
- Used IndexedDB, Service Workers, virtualization, Web Workers, or similar browser technologies
- Contributed to or maintained large open-source applications
Full 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: 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.