Mission
Build the most critical commercial system for modern enterprises, relied on by leaders in every industry.
Team Ownership
Tens of thousands of users from around the world use Planhat every day to manage over 2.6mn customers, 276bn data points, and automate 15mn workflows per month.
The customer is at the center of every business, and because every company is unique, the system has to be exceptionally flexible. At the same time, since it's used for very specific and critical workflows such as email sequences, projects, and automations; to explore data and present insights; to learn about what processes lead to what outcomes etc - this system has to have depth.
And because one of the core goals of the system is to help automate actions based on trends and signals in data, it needs to be highly connected, both internally and against other systems and data sources. Adding to this, many of our day-to-day users are non-technical so the system has to be intuitive and easy-to-use, feeling more like a consumer application than an old business system.
The intersection of these requirements - flexibility, depth, ease-of-use, and connectivity - is the reality our engineering team lives in every single day. We’re in charge of building architectures and features that scale across this wide variety of business use cases and performance requirements, and to deliver it with both speed and quality together with the rest of the product & engineering organisation.
Planhat’s ability to scale long term depends on the strength of our product. It depends on all the important decisions we make when writing the next line of code to keep innovating and our spot at the forefront.
People and Culture
Planhat engineering is a great match for people with high ambitions and the grit, experience and skills to make those ambitions come true. Planhat is not for those looking for "just a job".
We started without any external funding and almost only engineers, by choice. With limited resources, and high ambitions we had to be very efficient. The initial team of full-stack developers did the jobs of designers, QAs, PMs, platform engineers and application developers all at once. A lot of hard work, but also the freedom and luxury of making any product decisions we wanted. We always built for the long run, we built what we thought was right.. which isn't to say there wasn't the occasional hack or shortcut, since sometimes that's also the right thing to do.
Today it's a bigger team with some people dedicated to specific areas such as Platform, PM, QA, designers and different dev teams. But a lot of the core values and team culture is still the same: ambitious, high degree of ownership, leaders lead from the front, everyone is an individual contributor - we are doers and pragmatists, with a killer instinct for getting the work done while keeping the long-term in mind.
Because of our history, we have always needed to have a combination of urgency with a sense for scalability and architecture. As an example it means we try to keep meetings to a minimum and focus our time on doing the actual work (writing code) or discussing specific problems to solve in smaller groups.
Location
You'll find Planhat engineers in almost every corner of the world: Sweden, Egypt, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Philippines - and many more. We've been remote from the very start and love that freedom.
That said, we frequently meet up in smaller groups somewhere in the world for a shorter period of time to work on some specific project or just get some in-person time. Previous places where we've met up include Spain, Dubai, Colombia, Greece, Sweden, Turkey, Indonesia, and more.
Technology
On the platform and infrastructure side, we run most of Planhat on GCP and the infrastructure is managed as code. We have an advanced set-up built to handle multiple independent multi-tenant clusters spanning production, staging, sandboxes and local environments. We have a highly experienced platform team with many large and exciting challenges ahead of us to keep up with the latest solutions and our commercial growth.
Our frontend application is built with Typescript and Vue 3, with Pinia stores for state management. It’s mostly a new code base, based on lessons learned over many years and a recent move from AngularJS to Vue 2. We have a good structure for communication between stores, and CSS is largely based on Tailwind. We use Storybook for documentation of frontend components.
The backend consists of multiple services, most of which run NodeJS. MongoDB is the primary database, but we also leverage Big Query, Firebase and other storage mechanisms trying to pick the most suitable tool for each use case. We’re mostly using PubSub for queues, and cloud functions where it makes sense.
