Senior Frontend Engineer at Plain

Salary Range: £110000 - £75000

We are building the support platform for developer tools. Think Linear meets Stripe for customer support: A tool that’s both delightful to use out of the box and powerful to build with.

Support might seem boring at first, but we think it’s one of the most interesting products to work on. Support tools are the very definition of a productivity tool. They’re inherently multiplayer, high volume and collaborative with unique technical demands. Plus, every company that has customers, has customer support - a huge software market.

We’re looking for an experienced frontend engineer to help us lead and shape all things frontend at Plain. You'll be joining a small but experienced, commercially savvy, and product-centric team. Everyone on our team is technical, commits code, and speaks to customers. We maintain complete internal transparency on almost everything, and are just as driven by building a great product as we are by building a great company.

What you'll do

You’ll be the most senior individual contributor in our frontend discipline. So while you’ll be very hands-on, you’ll also have a huge impact on what we build, how we build it, and in helping build a frontend discipline known beyond Plain for the quality of its work.

Together with the team, you will work on everything from our most complex challenges to the smallest product improvements.

Here are some examples of things we need help with right now:

• Getting state management right: We've currently normalizing GraphQL queries into a global cache and updating entities via Websockets. Although functional we have a long road ahead to make this faster, more resilient and faster to build with. Fixing this will require some deep thinking and love around our frontend architecture.
• Building a great multiplayer experience: We want to make sure Plain is a delight to use with large teams. We need to develop a more resilient way to allow multiple people to be aware of each other when using Plain, and do so in a technically resilient way which handles all the complex conflicts and race conditions which come with multiplayer support.
• Improving our writing experience: Like Slack, typing is at the heart of Plain, so we want to deeply invest in our writing experience. We want to give you full keyboard control over Plain, let you seamlessly compose rich messages with code snippets, inline images and videos, and make it a breeze to help your customers. This will require some UI heavy lifting, and is the perfect challenge for someone excited about getting even the smallest interaction details right.

This is a great fit if you…

• ✅ Have substantial experience working on web apps with complex data fetching, state and performance challenges.
• ✅ Enjoy being hands-on with a focus on writing code and shipping things. There is a lot to build.
• ✅ Want to work day to day with Typescript, React, GraphQL and a fully serverless back-end.
• ✅ Enjoy the autonomy, uncertainty and unpredictability that comes with an early stage company.
• ✅ Are opinionated about, and love working on UI

This won’t be the right role if you…

• 👎 Want to manage a team. Given our team growth plans, this is unlikely to be a need in the next 12-24 months.
• 👎 Want all of the benefits that come with an established tech company - top-end comp, free drinks and lunches, etc.
• 👎 Want a traditional product team set up, with a predictable roadmap, clearly scoped out tickets, a PM, and so forth.

Why you should join

We’re a small team with a high trust culture, very few meetings and no bureaucracy. You can actually get things done here.

Our team combines experience from some of Europe’s category-defining companies. You’ll have super high bandwidth conversations here and find appreciation for even the smallest details in building a product. Between us, we’ve helped build companies and products like Deliveroo, Lyst, Freetrade, Babylon, Songkick and Hopin.

We continuously invest into our own developer experience. For example, with every PR we deploy a full end-to-end copy of our entire infra (no more “it worked locally”). It’s really fast to build things here. Read more about it here.

We are very close to our customers. They hold our product to the same high bar we do. We’ve had customers share everything from a button being one pixel off to nuanced developer experience improvements (and we love it!) Some of them even invested in our company.

We’re well financed by top tier investors like Index Ventures, Connect Ventures and some incredible angels. Read more about our most recent fundraise here.

We’re very proud of, and led by our values. For example, unlike many other companies, our goal is to build an intentionally small one. You can read more about them here.

Benefits & Basics

• 🌎 We’re remote-first. Work from wherever you want, within 2 hours of GMT
• 🏦 We pay competitive, globalised salaries for everyone, regardless of where you live
• 🧳 Quarterly offsites with the whole company in interesting and fun places (our last one was in Copenhagen!)
• 💻 £1000 per year to spend on your WFH setup, plus a desk at a coworking space whenever you need
• 📈 Everyone in our company gets a generous option grant on employee-friendly terms
• 🏝 35 days (including public holidays) to take whenever you wish, plus enhanced parental leave

(And at the end of the year, the founders cook the whole team dinner. You might feel that’s a threat rather than a benefit but we were told in a non-anonymous survey where definitely no pressure was applied that our cooking is good)

We want our team to reflect and celebrate the diversity of our society and build a product for everyone - if we fail in doing that, Plain does not deserve to exist. No matter who you are and the things that make you, you - you will be welcome here, and we can't wait to meet you.

There's a bit more about the kind of company we're building here if you're curious: https://plain.com/jobs