PLANEKS

At PLANEKS, we believe people do their best work when they have the freedom to grow. We build a culture where talented professionals can focus on meaningful work, grow continuously, and see the results of their contributions.

What We Offer

• 100% remote work opportunity and flexitime - choose working hours between 8:00-20:00 Kyiv time
• Personal Growth Budget in USD (Travel, Health & Psychotherapy, Sports, Education & Training, Software, Work Equipment).
• Competitive compensation in USD with regular salary reviews.
• Paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave.
• Continuous professional growth through mentorship, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• English Speaking Club with a native speaker.
• Access to AI tools, including coding assistants for engineers and LLM subscriptions for non-technical specialists.
• Transparent processes, flat management structure, and a supportive team culture.

About the Role

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)  to take ownership of test automation and software quality across our engineering team.

As the first SDET, you will build the test framework, define the testing strategy, and integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. You will work closely with the VP of Engineering, Staff Engineers, and the infrastructure team to help developers ship software faster and with confidence.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on making automated testing reliable and an integral part of the development process.

About Project

The project is a hospitality technology platform that helps restaurants, hotels, and coffee shops manage tip pooling, instant tip payouts, cashless tip distribution, reporting, compliance, labor costs, purchases, sales forecasting, and payroll.

The platform handles financial transactions where reliability and accuracy are critical. The engineering team is building the next generation of the platform and increasing release frequency. Reliable automated testing is essential to prevent regressions and ensure critical financial workflows function correctly.

The team works remotely across Canada, Japan, and Europe and follows two-week sprints.

Required Hard Skills

• Substantial experience building and owning test automation for a production web product.
• Strong engineering skills. The technology stack includes Python and Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis, Docker, and React with TypeScript, running on DigitalOcean. You don't need every piece of it, but you should be comfortable working with this type of system and in a large existing codebase to build the appropriate test strategy and infrastructure.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making them a deployment gate, including parallelization, quarantining flaky tests, test environments, and seeded data.
• Understanding of what belongs at the unit, integration, and end-to-end testing layers, and the ability to explain these decisions to developers.
• Ability to work closely with developers and infrastructure engineers to improve testing practices and make it easier for developers to write and use tests.
• Sound operational judgment when testing financial workflows, understanding that a missed regression in a tips platform can mean someone doesn't get paid, knowing which high-risk scenarios to test first, and being willing to communicate when software isn't ready to ship.
• Ability to work independently across a distributed team, communicate clearly in writing, and drive work without constant supervision.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Playwright.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or payroll.
• Experience testing third-party API integrations, contract testing, or service virtualization.
• Experience with visual regression testing tools such as Chromatic.
• Experience using AI tools to write and maintain tests effectively.
• Experience being the first test automation engineer in a company.

Required Soft Skills

• Ownership: Ability to take responsibility for the test strategy, automation framework, and quality metrics.
• Autonomy: Ability to work independently across a distributed team and drive work without constant supervision.
• Communication: Ability to communicate clearly and effectively in a remote-first environment. 
• Collaboration: Willingness to work closely with developers and infrastructure engineers and help them adopt effective testing practices.
• Critical thinking: Ability to identify high-risk scenarios and prioritize testing based on potential consequences.
• Pragmatic judgment: Ability to recognize when software is ready to ship and communicate honestly when it is not.

Key Responsibilities

In your first few months:

• Define and document the test strategy, including what to automate at each testing layer, what should block deployments, what developers own, and where manual checks are still needed.
• Develop the existing end-to-end test suite into a stable, reliable framework that runs fast enough for every pull request and blocks deployments when tests fail.
• Prioritize end-to-end test coverage for tip distribution, payouts, and other critical financial workflows.

Over the year:

• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to block merges, working with the infrastructure team on preview environments for pull requests, required CI checks, and the transition from weekly toward daily deployments.
• Build test data factories and seeded datasets that support realistic testing scenarios without using production data.
• Build and maintain a local simulator for third-party payment and banking APIs, keeping it aligned with changes to partner APIs.
• Improve the developer experience by enabling fast local test runs, providing clear failure reports, and reducing flaky tests.
• Define and track quality metrics, including escaped defects, flaky-test rates, and bugs caught before versus after release.

Who this position is not for

• Candidates looking for a manual QA role or a position focused on manual sign-off at the end of a sprint.
• Candidates looking for a management position. This is a hands-on individual contributor role, and there is no team to manage.
• Candidates looking for a product architecture role. The technical direction and money-movement design are owned by two Staff Engineers; this role focuses on test automation and determining whether the software is ready to ship.
• Candidates who expect to join a company with a mature test platform and an established team of automation engineers. The role involves building testing foundations alongside ongoing product development and greenfield work.

We are looking for people who are motivated to learn, take ownership, and grow together with us.

Sound like the right fit? Apply now - let's talk!

What We Offer

• 100% remote work opportunity and flexitime - choose working hours between 8:00-20:00 Kyiv time.
• Personal Growth Budget in USD (Travel, Health & Psychotherapy, Sports, Education & Training, Software, Work Equipment).
• Competitive compensation in USD with regular salary reviews.
• Paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave.
• Continuous professional growth through mentorship, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• English Speaking Club with a native speaker.
• Access to AI tools, including coding assistants for engineers and LLM subscriptions for non-technical specialists.
• Projects with clients across Europe and North America across FinTech, Logistics, Hospitality, E-commerce, Legal, Music, and other industries.
• Transparent processes, flat management structure, and a supportive team culture.

About the Role

• We are hiring a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to become one of the strongest technical contributors on the team.
• The single most important thing we’re looking for is experience scaling a SaaS product. We want someone who has already seen what happens as a live platform grows: increasing complexity, technical debt, scaling bottlenecks, evolving data models, unreliable integrations, and engineering decisions that worked at one stage but became expensive at the next.

• This is a hands-on senior engineering role with strong technical leadership expectations. You will design and write production code, own substantial systems end to end, influence architectural decisions, challenge technical direction when needed, and raise the engineering level of the people around you.

   

Project

• FinTech SaaS platform built for the restaurant and hospitality industry. Our products handle tip pooling and payouts, payroll, reporting and compliance, labor and operational data, and integrations with the systems hospitality businesses already use. The platform is live, serves thousands of customers and moves millions of dollars.

   

Required Hard Skills

• Several years operating at Senior Engineer level on a SaaS product that grew significantly while you were there. You have seen a system become meaningfully bigger and understand the problems that tend to arrive next.
• Strong Python and Django / Django REST Framework experience, or deep experience in a closely comparable backend stack.
• Strong React and TypeScript experience, with the ability to work effectively across backend and frontend when required.
• Strong PostgreSQL and data modeling skills. You should be comfortable designing schemas that can evolve as the business grows into new products and safely changing them once they contain production data.
• Production experience with asynchronous and distributed workloads using Celery or comparable technologies.
• Strong understanding of API design and third-party integrations, including failure handling, retries, idempotency, data consistency, reconciliation, and situations where the system on the other side is unreliable or outside your control.
• Strong understanding of software architecture and the ability to make pragmatic architectural decisions inside a large existing codebase rather than only designing systems from scratch.
• Experience identifying and addressing performance, scalability, reliability, and maintainability problems before they become critical.
• Strong testing practices and experience safely evolving systems that must remain operational while they are being changed.
• Production experience with Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, error tracking, and observability. 
• Strong Linux knowledge. 
• Sound judgment about technical debt: knowing the difference between an acceptable shortcut and one that will create significant problems later, and being able to improve a system while it remains in production.
• Everyday experience with using AI agents for work (Claude Code or Codex). Familiar with configuring AI toolset, understanding pros and cons of modern AI.

Current Stack

• Django / DRF, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Docker, Traefik, Datadog, Sentry, Mailgun, GitHub Workflows.
• Next.js, MUI, TanStack Query, React Hook Form, Zod, Vitest.

Nice to Have

• FinTech or financial systems experience, particularly payments, payouts, ledgers, reconciliation, payroll, banking, audit trails, or other systems where financial correctness matters.
• Experience with restaurant or hospitality technology, including POS, scheduling, workforce management, payroll, or similar systems.
• Experience with high-volume or business-critical third-party integrations.
• Experience improving a system with meaningful legacy code or technical debt while the product remained actively developed.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architectures.
• Experience improving engineering practices across a team rather than only within your own work.
• Experience as a Senior Engineer in a company of roughly 20–200 people, where your role included helping decide what technical work actually mattered.

Required Soft Skills

• Ability to take technical ownership beyond your own tickets and think about the health of the product and engineering system as a whole.
• Strong engineering judgment and the confidence to challenge technical decisions constructively, including decisions made by Staff Engineers and engineering leadership.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Problems will not always arrive fully specified, and part of your job is asking the questions that make them clear before code gets written.
• Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, Product, and non-technical stakeholders.
• A strong teaching mindset. You explain your reasoning, document important decisions, review code seriously, and make the engineers around you better rather than becoming the only person who understands a difficult system.
• Comfortable taking leadership during difficult technical situations without waiting for someone else to define every step of the solution.
• Strong written communication and self-direction. The team is distributed across Canada and Europe with limited live overlap, so you need to communicate clearly asynchronously and drive your own work.
• Fluent English, written and spoken.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own substantial systems end to end

• Take meaningful problems that have been identified but not fully solved and work with Staff Engineers and Product to determine the right technical approach.
• Own complex initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, migration, testing, rollout, and production monitoring.
• Design not only for the expected path, but also for what happens when something goes wrong in production.

• Remain responsible for the systems you build once they are carrying real customer data and real money.

   

2. Help strengthen the architecture of a growing product

• Work closely with Staff Engineers and the VP of Engineering on architectural decisions and technical direction.
• Understand the existing architecture and identify where today’s decisions may create tomorrow’s problems.
• Identify areas where the platform may struggle as product complexity, integrations, customers, data volume, and transaction volume increase.
• Challenge architectural decisions constructively when you see a better approach.

• Help evolve the architecture incrementally through small, safe improvements rather than unnecessary rewrites or over-engineering.

   

3. Protect correctness, reliability, and engineering quality

• Treat financial correctness as a first-class engineering concern.
• Design for reconciliation and auditability: how we prove a number is correct, understand how it was produced, and detect discrepancies before customers do.
• Use Datadog, Sentry, logs, production data, and other signals to identify recurring problems and their root causes.
• Improve observability, error handling, testing, deployment safety, performance, and operational reliability.

• Make sure recurring production problems are solved systematically rather than repeatedly patched.

   

4. Own technically difficult areas of the product

• Lead work involving complex third-party integrations, asynchronous workflows, data synchronization, reconciliation, migrations, and failure recovery.
• Design systems that behave predictably when external APIs fail, requests are duplicated, jobs execute late, or data arrives in an unexpected state.
• Work closely with Product to make technical feasibility and engineering constraints visible before implementation begins.

• Help break large technical initiatives into safe, incremental pieces that can be built, migrated, and released without unnecessarily putting the existing platform at risk.

   

5. Make the case for important technical work

• Identify technical debt, platform investment, reliability work, and architectural improvements that may not naturally appear on the product roadmap.
• Distinguish between debt that can safely remain and debt that is materially affecting reliability, engineering speed, or future product development.
• Make the business and technical case for that work using evidence rather than engineering preference alone.

• Help sequence improvements so they support product development rather than competing with it unnecessarily.

   

6. Raise the level of the engineering team

• Be a strong technical reference point for other engineers.
• Review architecture, designs, and pull requests with a focus on correctness, reasoning, and long-term maintainability.
• Explain why you would make a decision differently rather than simply leaving a verdict.
• Mentor engineers through reviews, pairing, technical discussions, and example.
• Document important knowledge and decisions so understanding stays with the team rather than with one individual.

• Take leadership when a difficult technical problem crosses multiple areas or engineers.

   

7. Remain hands-on

• Design and write production code across the backend and frontend.
• Take direct ownership of technically difficult or risky work when appropriate.
• Debug difficult production issues and establish their root causes.
• Read and understand the existing codebase before changing it.

• Build enough direct knowledge of the platform to ensure your technical decisions are grounded in how the system actually works.

   

Who this position is not for

• This is not a role for someone whose definition of seniority is simply delivering more complicated tickets. 
• If you prefer receiving clearly defined tickets and technical solutions and then implementing them, this role will probably be frustrating.
• It is not a management role. You won’t have direct reports or headcount responsibility. Leadership here comes through technical ownership, judgment, mentoring, reviews, and influence.
• It is also not a Staff Engineer role. Our Staff Engineers and VP of Engineering set the overall technical direction and architecture. You will help shape that direction, challenge it when needed, and fully own the design and implementation of substantial systems within it.
• It is not a greenfield role. You will be joining a live platform with thousands of customers and a roadmap that does not pause while technical improvements are made. Much of the work involves understanding existing systems, migrating them safely, and improving them incrementally rather than replacing them.
• If you naturally ask what happens when the system gets significantly larger, how it fails, how we know the data is correct, and what today’s shortcut will cost us a year from now, you’ll recognize the work.

Things You Should Know Before Applying

• The engineering challenge is no longer simply building features quickly. It is continuing to ship while improving reliability, scalability, architecture, and the technical foundation required for significant year-over-year growth
• There is technical debt. Part of your job is determining which debt actually matters, making its impact visible, and helping address it without stopping product development.
• Requirements will sometimes be incomplete. We expect you to help shape the solution rather than wait for perfect specifications.

• You will be expected to disagree when necessary, propose better approaches, and explain the reasoning behind them.

   

Let’s start with what PLANEKS offers:
 

• Fast and comfortable hiring process.
• 100% remote work opportunity and flexitime - choose working hours between 8:00-20:00.
• Salary paid in USD + tax compensation. Revision every 12 months. We want everyone to be confident in what tomorrow brings.
• $$$$ budget - Travel tickets, Work equipment, Health insurance, Software, Sport, Training.
• Everything to ensure a good rest. YES: Paid vacation, national holidays, sick leaves (and support in case of serious diseases). NO: overtime, work on weekends.
• A friendly and professional team that supports you. Well, we're proud of how we handle that. So you can always count on us.
• Speaking clubs with a native speaker to constantly maintain your English level.
• No bureaucracy - transparent processes and flat management. Working remotely means keeping things as simple as possible to work efficiently.

Requirements:
 

• 4+ years of experience as an IT Recruiter, managing full-cycle recruitment processes in IT outsourcing and outstaffing companies.
• Experience in hiring for technical roles (Python engineers, QA, DevOps, and other engineering roles) as well as non-technical roles (marketing, sales, business analytics, etc.).
• Strong sourcing skills and ability to choose effective channels and strategies.
• Hands-on experience with sourcing tools (LinkedIn, job boards, Boolean search, AI tools).
• Ability to effectively assess candidates (both hard and soft skills);
• Ability to manage vacancies from intake to offer stage.
• Ability to work with hiring managers - clarify requirements and align expectations.
• General understanding of web development technologies and SDLC.
• Strong communication skills and Intermediate English. 
• Growth mindset and a proactive approach to improving recruitment processes.
   

Responsibilities:

• Manage full-cycle recruitment - from intake to offer and onboarding.
• Work on multiple vacancies  with different requirements and seniority levels.
• Improve and implement sourcing strategies to increase hiring efficiency.
• Ensure a positive candidate experience throughout the hiring process.
• Collaborate closely with hiring managers and keep hiring progress transparent.
• Maintain accurate data in ATS, keep recruitment data up to date, and track recruitment performance.
• Maintain internal recruitment reporting.
• Contribute to improving recruitment processes and overall hiring quality.

This position is open only to candidates currently based in Canada, who have valid authorization to work in Canada. Candidates based in Toronto are highly preferred.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to own the front half of the delivery process: to make sure work starts with a business goal and a validated problem, not with a design, and that by the time something reaches engineering it is shaped, sequenced, and feasible.

Project

FinTech product built for the restaurant and hospitality space. We integrate with POS and scheduling systems and sit on top of the money flows those systems generate.

We grew fast in startup mode, and it worked as we have a live product, real customers, and real revenue. What we don't yet have is a delivery process that matches the size of what we're building. 

Required Hard Skills

• 5+ years in product management, including at least one product with real technical complexity behind it.
• Prior FinTech experience (payments, payouts, reconciliation, lending, banking, or embedded finance), or direct restaurant/hospitality tech experience (POS, scheduling, workforce management, delivery platforms).
• Demonstrable experience introducing or substantially reshaping a delivery process in a company that had outgrown ad-hoc ways of working. We will ask you to walk us through exactly what you changed, what resistance you hit, and what it measurably improved.
• Strong requirements practice: you can write and review PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, and flow documentation, and you know when to hand that off versus do it yourself.
• Experience working with third-party APIs or platform integrations, including the messy parts: partner limitations, versioning, data reconciliation, error handling, validation layer.
• Strong BA skills to act as an owner of the product requirements, including describing and maintaining the product backlog
• Strong product toolkit. We value strong processes over proficiency with any specific tool, but expect broad hands-on experience across modern product and AI tools, with the ability to select and adapt the right toolkit for the job. 

• Fluent English, written and spoken.

   

Required Soft Skills

• Comfort working alongside engineers on architecture and technical debt conversations with enough depth to understand the trade-offs, ask sharp questions, and be trusted in the room.

• Ability to hold a position with a founder-CEO. You'll be asked to change how initiatives currently start, which means disagreeing productively and often.

   

Nice to Have

• Hands-on familiarity with specific POS or scheduling platforms (Toast, Square, Lightspeed, 7shifts, Deputy, or similar).
• Experience with a product that had to earn back reliability and trust after a fast-growth phase.
• Track record building product analytics from a low baseline with instrumentation, funnels, defining the metrics that matter.
• Comfort with BPMN or similar process modeling.
• Multi-tenant SaaS or B2B2C experience.

Key Responsibilities

1. Shape the delivery process end-to-end: 

- Introduce and implement a discovery-to-delivery flow

- Establish where design, engineering, and BA input enter the process, and make technical feasibility a first-class input.

- Define the artifacts and quality bar for each stage of the delivery process.

2. Get the backlog shaped: 

- Break large ambiguous initiatives into slices that can be estimated, built, and released independently.

- Own the roadmap and its sequencing, and keep it honest about capacity and dependencies.

3. Balance new value against the debt

- Build a shared, evidence-based view of where technical debt is costing us delivery speed, reliability, or the ability to ship what's next.

4. Own the integration and domain surface

- Own the product side of our POS and scheduling integrations

- Translate FinTech constraints such as payments, reconciliation, settlement, data handling, compliance into requirements engineering can build against.

- Bring the operational reality of restaurants into product decisions: shift patterns, staff turnover, tips and payouts, peak-hour behavior, tax background, low tolerance for anything that slows down service.

Who this position is not for
This is a build-the-process role, not a run-the-process role. If you need an established framework to operate inside, this will frustrate you. If you've stabilized delivery in a company that outgrew its early habits, you'll recognize the work immediately.

Things you should know before applying:

• The process is genuinely not there yet. You are building it, largely alone, while shipping.
• There is real technical debt. Some of what you want to do will be slower than it should be, and part of your job is making that visible and getting it funded.
• Initiatives currently start closer to solution than problem, and changing that means changing habits at the top of the company. We know this and we're hiring for it - but it will take persistence.

Recruitment Process

• Introductory Call (45 min).
• HR Interview (1 hr).
• Technical Interview (1 hr).

• Founder/Client meeting.

   

We are looking for people who are motivated to learn, take ownership, and grow together with us.

Sound like the right fit? Apply now - let's talk!

Create real impact with PLANEKS

At PLANEKS, we believe people do their best work when they have the freedom to grow. We build a culture where talented professionals can focus on meaningful work, grow continuously, and see the results of their contributions.

What We Offer

• 100% remote work opportunity and flexitime - choose working hours between 8:00-20:00 Kyiv time
• Personal Growth Budget in USD (Travel, Health & Psychotherapy, Sports, Education & Training, Software, Work Equipment).
• Competitive compensation in USD with regular salary reviews.
• Paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave.
• Continuous professional growth through mentorship, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• English Speaking Club with a native speaker.
• Access to AI tools, including coding assistants for engineers and LLM subscriptions for non-technical specialists.
• Projects with clients across Europe and North America across FinTech, Logistics, Hospitality, E-commerce, Legal, Music, and other industries.
• Transparent processes, flat management structure, and a supportive team culture.

About the Role 

We’re looking for a Python Developer who wants to take real ownership of what they build - from understanding the problem and shaping the solution to delivering a reliable result in production.

Depending on the project, you may be building a new product from the ground up, extending an established platform, solving complex technical problems, or improving systems that already serve real users. We don’t expect engineers to simply execute predefined tasks. We expect them to understand the context, make sound technical decisions, communicate openly with clients and teammates, and take responsibility for the outcome.

You’ll use AI/LLM tools extensively where they make you more effective - for implementation, analysis, testing, debugging, research, and everyday development workflows — while applying your own judgment to what gets designed, reviewed, and shipped.

We value ownership, product thinking, pragmatism, curiosity, and clear communication. If you care not only about how something is implemented, but also why it is being built and whether it actually solves the problem, you’ll fit well here.

Required Hard Skills

1. Software development experience with:

• Python and Django.
• Other Python frameworks (e.g., Flask).
• PostgreSQL, MySQL.
• Celery, Redis, ElasticSearch.
• Cloud providers, DevOps, CI/CD.
• Unit, integration, E2E tests.

2. Knowledge of REST and experience working with REST APIs.

3. Experience with JS, HTML, CSS (Usually 0-20% of activity).

4. Fluent in Claude, Codex, or similar products. Knows how to set up local agents and their limitations.

Required Soft Skills

• Ownership and accountability. Takes responsibility for their work and follows through on commitments.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills. Communicates clearly and works effectively with teammates and external stakeholders.
•  Solution-oriented mindset. Focuses on finding practical solutions rather than getting stuck in problems or unnecessary details.
• Product mindset. Understands the purpose behind the work and cares about the impact on the product and its users.
• Pragmatic decision-making. Knows how to balance quality, speed, and complexity, and when a solution is good enough.
• Adaptability and willingness to learn. Comfortable with changing projects, technologies, and requirements, and enjoys learning new things.

Key Responsibilities

• Depending on the project, you may be building products from scratch, working as part of existing development teams, modernizing or rewriting existing solutions.
• Solve technical challenges - all our projects are different, and you’ll never be bored with the same tasks every day, so your acquisitive mind will have great challenges regularly.
• Take care of quality (code, test, business features, documentation) - everyone enjoys working with clean, readable code, so it is important to keep it such.
• Participate in code reviews - usually, it is cross-reviews in the team or reviews by a senior person.
• Communicate with internal and external teams - we’re in touch with great minds - inventive clients, and supportive colleagues!
• Follow and actively apply our AI-assisted development approach in everyday engineering work, using AI across code generation, refactoring, debugging, documentation, and technical research.

Who this position is not for
This role is not for someone who prefers routine tasks, works only from predefined requirements, or avoids taking ownership of technical decisions. It may also not be the right fit if you’re not interested in learning new technologies, collaborating closely with others, or exploring how AI can improve the way you build software. 

We are looking for people who are motivated to learn, take ownership, and grow together with us.

Sound like the right fit? Apply now - let's talk!