Staff Software Engineer
Location: Remote — US, with core hours overlapping Central Time
Partnership: EQL Tech has partnered with Planoly to appoint a mission-critical Staff Software Engineer to lead a product squad and own the shared foundations — auth, permissions, notifications and billing — that every surface of the platform depends on.
About the Company & The Mission
EQL Tech is proud to represent Planoly, the social content platform built for creators and solopreneurs. Planoly is where a creator plans, schedules and publishes across every major channel — one workspace instead of six tabs and a reminder app.
Planoly is profitable and bootstrapped. No VC money, no runway clock, no board steering the roadmap. Product decisions are made because customers asked for them, and the company has the rare freedom to build for the long term. It was recently acquired, and is now nearing the end of a ground-up rebuild on a modern TypeScript stack — the kind of clean slate most engineers wait an entire career to get near.
The mission is simple: give independent creators the tooling that until recently only a marketing department could afford.
The Team
You will be joining a small, senior engineering team where every person's work is visible in the product.
- The Core Team: Engineering is led by Mouad Belbah, previously Head of Engineering at Snipfeed. The team is deliberately small and deliberately senior — no layers, no ticket queue, no waiting for permission. Work runs in squads: a staff-level lead, a product partner, and one or two engineers. Squads own their scope end to end, from the first conversation about what to build through to what ships.
The Role: Staff Software Engineer
As Staff Software Engineer, you will lead a squad and build alongside it. You will scope the work, set the timeline, keep your engineers unblocked — and then write the code with them. This is a hands-on staff role, not a step away from the keyboard.
As Staff Software Engineer, you will:
- Ship end to end: take features from database schema and GraphQL resolvers through to React components and mobile screens, owning the whole vertical slice rather than a layer of it
- Own the shared core: build and maintain the authentication, permissions, notifications and billing logic that every other surface depends on — the work that has to be right
- Complete the mobile experience: finish and refine the React Native app, bringing it to the same standard as the web product
- Design durable background workflows: build the scheduling, payments and integration pipelines that have to run reliably at 3am without anyone watching them
- Lead a squad without managing it: set direction, unblock people, raise the technical bar by example — the influence comes from the work, not a title
- Shape what gets built: work directly with product, design and marketing on the problem, not just the implementation
The Stack: Next.js, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind and a custom Radix design system. GraphQL with Apollo. Node.js, PostgreSQL with Drizzle, Stripe, Novu and Inngest. React Native with Expo. Vercel, a Turborepo monorepo, Vitest and Playwright. Nobody is expected to arrive knowing all of it.
Requirements
Your Profile
- Experienced enough to have opinions: eight or more years building production software, or six if your track record is unusually strong — you have shipped things, maintained them, and learned what you would do differently
- Deep in TypeScript and React: strong fundamentals rather than framework trivia, and genuine comfort moving across the stack — schema, resolver, component, screen — without needing a handoff at each boundary
- Mobile-capable or mobile-curious: React Native or Expo experience, or the appetite and aptitude to get there quickly — the mobile app is a real part of this role, not an occasional errand
- A leader without the title: you have led a small team or a significant initiative — tech lead, founding engineer, or simply the person others gravitate toward when something hard needs doing. No management experience required
- Fluent with AI coding agents: they are part of how you work day to day, and you have a considered sense of where they accelerate you and where they need supervision
- Pragmatic by instinct: you ship and iterate rather than over-architect, you can tell the difference between a decision that is expensive to reverse and one that is not, and you spend your design budget accordingly
- Comfortable with ambiguity: you can scope your own work, set your own quality bar, and make progress without waiting to be told what to do next
- No task beneath you: shared billing logic, a flaky Playwright test, a customer bug that turns out to be a data problem — you treat the unglamorous work as the job, because at this team size it is
- US-based and authorised to work without new sponsorship — transfers are possible. Core hours overlapping Central Time
- Experience in the creator economy, social platforms, or content tooling is a strong plus, not a requirement
Benefits
The Offer
- Compensation: $180,000–210,000 base salary, plus equity
- Equity in a company that already makes money: Planoly is profitable and bootstrapped, so equity here is a share of a real business rather than a lottery ticket on the next raise
- Health, dental and vision cover
- Remote within the US: work from wherever you are, with core hours overlapping Central Time so the team actually overlaps
- Flexible PTO: and a team that expects you to use it
- Annual team offsites: the whole company in one room, a few times a year's worth of context in a few days
How They Hire
No take-home assignments. No algorithmic whiteboarding.
- One or two technical conversations built around refactoring real code and system design — the work you would actually be doing
- A conversation with the Head of Engineering and Chief of Staff
- A final conversation with the Head of Product and CEO
- Feedback within a couple of days at each stage
