[Hiring] Software Engineer, Backend (Python) @Plane Software, Inc.

Role Description

Plane keeps live work state in sync across thousands of workspaces, including self-hosted clusters we will never see, and that machinery now has to carry agents that read and change state at machine speed. You will work across the Django services behind projects, cycles, issues, and permissions, the event streams and change data capture that push state out to every client, and the caching and query paths that keep a large workspace fast. You will start on scoped surfaces and take on larger ones as you learn the system. All of it ships to Cloud and self-hosted customers from one codebase, so you will design for machines you cannot log into, working alongside product and frontend engineers in San Francisco and Hyderabad.

What you'll do

• Own backend surfaces end to end, from API contract and data model through migration and rollout, starting with scoped ones and taking on larger ones as you learn the system.
• Extend the real-time sync path alongside the engineers who designed it: event streams, change data capture, and the caching in front of them.
• Measure and improve query performance as workspaces grow. Query plans, indexes, and connection pooling are yours to read and fix.
• Instrument what you ship so that a degradation shows up in our dashboards before a customer reports it, and take your turn responding when it fires.
• Work daily with product and frontend engineers across San Francisco and Hyderabad, and with community members whose issue reports become your test cases.
• Debug what you cannot reproduce, on hardware and networks we will never have access to.

What you'll bring

• You have shipped Python to production.
• Point us to something you built, and tell us one decision in it you would make differently now.
• You have worked in Django or a comparable framework.
• Models, migrations, and the request cycle are familiar rather than new.
• You are comfortable in SQL, not only the ORM.
• You can read a query, add an index, and say why it helped.
• You have debugged something in production.
• A real incident, and what you changed because of it.
• You write clearly. A public issue thread gets better when you show up in it.

Nice to haves

• You have contributed to Plane, run it self-hosted, or maintained another open project people rely on.
• You have worked with event streams or message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar).
• You understand deployment beyond a deploy button: containers, migrations across versions, and what changes when customers run your releases themselves.
• You have shipped software into regulated or isolated environments: banking, defense, healthcare, or air-gapped anything.
• You have built systems where AI agents act on real data, and you have opinions about state, permissions, and audit trails.

Tech

• Backend: Python/Django, Golang, Node.js, Postgres, Redis
• Messaging: RabbitMQ, Kafka
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Rancher
• Observability: Datadog, Sentry
• Everyday tools: GitHub, Plane (yes, we run on it), Figma, Slack

Why Plane?

• Every company says it is different. We will try evidence instead.
• The scope is real.
• We are a passion team serving companies of every size, including some of the largest in the world. Something you ship this month will run inside a Fortune 500 company and a 50-person startup in the same week, and you will hear from both.
• The constraints make you better.
• Plane runs in our cloud, in customers' clouds, and on machines that will never touch the internet. Much of the work happens in the open, where the issues, the fixes, and the roadmap conversations are public. Building software that survives all of that is harder than building an ordinary SaaS product, and it is a better education than most companies can offer.
• The people-and-agents future is being built here, in production.
• We think humans and AI agents will share one system of action for work. We are building that system now, for customers who already depend on it, and you will work on that problem directly whatever your role.
• Your name is on the work.
• The teams are deeply connected enough that credit and responsibility both find you fast. That is some pressure. Mostly it is the fun part.