About the Role

This role is at the heart of building and scaling the API infrastructure that powers Plane's core platform. The Backend Engineer will lead the design and development of high-performance, production-grade APIs using FastAPI, while working alongside a team that values clean architecture, developer experience, and open-source impact. You will work with modern backend technologies - including asynchronous Python, event-driven systems, and advanced caching - to ensure our platform remains fast, reliable, and scalable as we grow.

Collaboration, technical ownership, and a passion for shipping meaningful software to the open-source community are central to thriving in this role.

What You Will Do
• Design, build, and maintain high-performance REST APIs using FastAPI as the primary framework.
• Architect and implement asynchronous, non-blocking backend services that scale with our growing user base.
• Drive real-time data synchronization across platform services using event-driven patterns and change-data-capture (CDC).
• Improve system performance through advanced caching strategies, connection pooling, and query optimization.
• Strengthen platform reliability through robust observability, monitoring, and alerting - enabling fast and confident incident response.
• Contribute to architectural and infrastructural upgrades that enhance system scalability and resilience.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend, DevOps, and product teams to deliver seamless, user-centric features.
• Share innovations and contribute meaningfully to Plane's open-source community.
• Help define and elevate engineering best practices across the backend team.

Skills You Will Need to Bring
• Strong hands-on expertise in FastAPI - this is the primary requirement for this role.
• Proficiency in Python; experience with Django is a plus but not required.
• Solid understanding of asynchronous programming in Python (asyncio, async/await patterns).
• A self-starter with a bias for ownership - you take problems end-to-end.
• Demonstrated experience building and scaling backend systems in production environments.
• Strong grasp of database design, performance tuning, and deployment strategies.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, distributed engineering team.
• 3-5 years of proven experience in backend development, with at least 2 years working specifically with FastAPI
• Familiarity with GraphQL will be considered a strong plus.

Tech
• FastAPI (primary), Django/Python (secondary), Golang, NodeJS, Postgres, and Redis in the backend.
• Hosted on AWS Cloud with Kubernetes (k8s) and Rancher.
• Experience with message queues and task scheduling using RabbitMQ or Kafka.
• Monitored with DataDog and Sentry.
• Tools: GitHub, Slack, Plane, Figma, Whimsical.