Principal Engineer, Frontend

About this job

Plane is building an open, adaptable work management platform designed for a future where humans and AI agents work together. The platform combines projects, knowledge, and requests into a single system used by organizations globally, including top regulated industries. As a Principal Engineer for Frontend, you will lead the client-side architecture for Plane's local-first client, where state lives in the browser and syncs dynamically. Your work will involve handling dense views with thousands of issues, the collaborative editor, offline and caching layers, and foundational design system components. On a normal day, you will collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and backend engineers located in San Francisco and Hyderabad, making technical decisions, reviewing high-risk implementations, and writing code that lands in a public open-source repository.

Responsibilities

• 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 including rendering, memory usage, load times, and interaction latency.
• Set frontend architecture and engineering standards, and review 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.

Requirements

• 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 including client-side persistence, synchronization, caching, and offline behavior.
• Found and fixed frontend performance problems in complex, data-heavy applications.
• Understand state management and browser architecture to design maintainable frontend systems.

Good 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.

Who should apply

This role suits a seasoned frontend engineer with deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and large-scale web architecture who thrives on complex technical challenges like local-first synchronization and real-time performance. Candidates should have a strong background in building data-dense applications and want to shape engineering standards while working in an open-source, highly collaborative global environment. The posting does not mention whether freshers can apply, requiring a minimum of 10+ years of software engineering experience.

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