Junior Frontend Engineer

ABOUT PLANE

Plane is an incisive response to config-heavy, opinionated, and restrictive project management software. Check out our website https://plane.so/.

In just two years, Plane’s grown to #1 in its category on GitHub and become a viable open-core alternative to Jira, Monday, Wrike, Asana, ClickUp, and Linear, not to mention all-in-one tools like Notion or Obsidian.

Our growth has come on the back of the product’s true flexibility without artificial limits, simple configurations that work out of the box, and thoughtfully packaged features that nurture our customers’ growth instead of punishing it.

As a modern product start-up, we obsess over new and power users equally. Our mission is to empower teams everywhere with the simplest, most delightful work management experience on the planet. Our vision is to become the WorkOS of the future with a workbench of unified tools and techniques that intuitively and progressively form a greater whole for knowledge workers.

We’re well capitalized, backed by OSS Capital, and are revenue-positive. Our coworkers include ex-Microsoft, Deloitte, [24]7, Nutanix, and Yahoo! in our 50+ strong human force today.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for a Junior Frontend Engineer who is early in their career but already shows real hunger for the craft of building software. This is a role for someone who wants to work on a product that thousands of teams rely on, learn from engineers who care deeply about quality, and grow quickly by taking on meaningful, well-scoped problems.

You won't just be picking up tickets. You'll contribute to real user-facing features, pair with senior engineers on harder problems, and steadily take on more ownership as you grow. Our expectation is that within a year, you'll be shipping features end-to-end with confidence.

You'll work directly with designers, product managers, and other engineers in a tight feedback loop, and your work will reach hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of teams globally.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build user-facing features. Implement user-facing features across our product, contributing to UI components, data models, and API integrations. You'll start with well-scoped work and gradually take on larger, more ambitious surfaces as you grow.

- Contribute to our sync and real-time collaboration layer. Work alongside senior engineers to help extend our data synchronization mechanism and collaborative editing tools, which use a local-first architecture. You'll learn how modern sync engines, serialization, and conflict resolution actually work in production.

- Learn and apply browser-level performance techniques. Get hands-on with Service Workers and IndexedDB for caching, and contribute to making Plane feel fast on slow networks and functional when users are offline.

- Help push UI performance. Profile and optimize rendering paths — virtualization, memoization, selective re-renders — guided by senior engineers and our performance goals. Complex, dense views are a core part of Plane, and keeping them smooth is a shared responsibility.

- Add instrumentation to what you ship. Help build out analytics, monitoring, and alerting around new features so the team can spot issues early. You'll learn to think about observability as part of shipping, not as an afterthought.

- Work with our TypeScript tooling and build pipeline. Get comfortable with Vite and Rolldown, and contribute to keeping our developer experience fast and our production bundles lean.

- Participate in our open-source work. Plane is open-source at its core. You'll contribute patches, review community PRs, and help us maintain a healthy public codebase.

- Grow into strong engineering habits. Write clear code, ask good questions in reviews, document your work, and adopt the testing and review practices of a senior engineering team from day one.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- 2–4 years of professional frontend experience, with a portfolio of work (production apps, side projects, or open-source contributions) that shows you can ship real software.

- Solid working knowledge of TypeScript and React. You're comfortable with modern React — hooks, component composition, context — and you write TypeScript with intent rather than just appeasing the compiler.

- Working understanding of routing and state management. Practical experience with React Router and at least one client-side state management library (MobX, Redux, Zustand, or similar). You should be able to reason about when state belongs local vs. global and how reactivity flows through your app.

- Comfort writing modern CSS. You can build responsive, themeable UIs and are comfortable with utility-first CSS (Tailwind) or a similar modern approach.

- Good instincts for design and UI details. You don't have to be a designer, but you should notice when something feels off — a misaligned element, a clumsy empty state, a jarring transition — and care enough to fix it.

- A curious, prototyping mindset. You're the kind of engineer who'd rather build a small, working version of an idea than argue about it in the abstract.

- Comfort working in a small, fast-moving team. You can take ownership of a task, ask good clarifying questions, and drive it to completion without needing constant direction.

- Attention to detail and a craft mindset. You care about the small things — the empty states, the loading behavior, the micro-interactions — because they add up to how the product feels.

- A learner's attitude. You're eager to pick up new tools, unafraid to ask questions, and open to feedback in code review and beyond.

NICE TO HAVE

- Contributions to open-source projects, even small ones.

- Exposure to rich-text editor frameworks (ProseMirror, CodeMirror, Lexical, Tiptap).

- Familiarity with Service Workers, IndexedDB, or offline-first app patterns.

- Experience with Electron or desktop app packaging.

- Prior experience on project management, productivity, or collaboration products.

OUR TECH STACK

Frontend

- React with TailwindCSS, using hooks for composable functionality

- React Router for client-side routing

- MobX for binding the data model to the UI

- ProseMirror-based content editor

- Electron for the desktop application

Backend & Infrastructure

- Django/Python, Golang, and Elixir services

PostgreSQL and Redis

- Public REST and GraphQL APIs with full access to user data

- AWS Cloud with Kubernetes and Rancher

Tooling & Monitoring

- Internal design system with a React component library

- Vite and Rolldown for build tooling

- DataDog and Sentry for observability

- GitHub, Slack, Plane, Figma, and Whimsical for day-to-day work

WHY JOIN PLANE

- Accelerate your growth. Work alongside senior engineers who genuinely enjoy mentoring and will invest in your development. Code reviews, pairing sessions, and architecture discussions are real learning moments here, not formalities.

- Ship work that matters. The features you build will be used by thousands of teams globally. You'll see the impact of your work in production within weeks of joining — not after months of onboarding.

- Learn the full stack of modern frontend. From local-first sync to real-time collaboration to performance at scale, Plane touches nearly every interesting problem in modern frontend engineering. It's a fast way to grow from "I can build features" to "I can design systems."

- Build in the open. Everything you ship lands in an open-source codebase. Your GitHub contribution graph will reflect the real work you're doing — visible to the community and useful for your career.

- A culture of craft and kindness. We write things down, review each other's work carefully, and treat questions — especially from new engineers — as a healthy sign of engagement.

- Room to grow into more. As you mature in the role, you'll naturally take on bigger surfaces, more design input, and more ownership. We hire junior engineers expecting them to become senior engineers here.