Principal Engineer, Frontend

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.

What you'll do

• Take Plane's frontend to real-time and local-first across work items, boards, documents, and other core product surfaces.
• Own client-side state, synchronization, caching, offline behavior, and conflict resolution.
• Own frontend performance in large workspaces: rendering, memory usage, load times, and interaction latency.
• Set frontend architecture and engineering standards, and review the designs and implementations that carry the most risk.
• Work with product, design, and backend teams to ship features that hold up from the API to the screen.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with React, TypeScript, and frontend architecture at scale.
• You have built real-time applications using WebSockets, subscriptions, or event-driven architectures.
• You have worked on local-first problems: client-side persistence, synchronization, caching, and offline behavior.
• You have found and fixed frontend performance problems in complex, data-heavy applications.
• You understand state management and browser architecture, and you design frontend systems other people can maintain.

Nice to haves

• You have built collaborative or multi-user applications with concurrent updates.
• You have worked with CRDTs, OT, or other synchronization and conflict-resolution approaches.
• You have built dense products such as project management tools, editors, spreadsheets, or design tools.
• You have used IndexedDB, Service Workers, virtualization, Web Workers, or similar browser technologies.
• You have contributed to or maintained large open-source applications.