--- title: 'Director of Engineering, Core AI Experience at Retool' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-core-ai-experience-retool-san-francisco-0tmhq89bhemg' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-12' --- # Director of Engineering, Core AI Experience at Retool - **Company:** Retool - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $342k–$415k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-11-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/retool/am9icG9zdDrRFjThRFMzl8GqI3_7B9yl ## Job description ## WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU: We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Retool’s Core AI Experience—the product experiences that help people turn business problems into working software with AI. You’ll shape how users go from an idea to an app or agent connected to real data, and how they test, refine, and confidently put what they build into use. Building with AI changes what users expect from Retool. Getting to a first version should feel quick, but the experience also needs to hold up as requirements become more complex. Users need to understand what AI has built, guide its decisions, and move fluidly between generating software and editing it directly. Your teams will make those interactions intuitive, reliable, and useful for real business work. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, developer experience, and applied AI. You’ll partner closely with Product and Design to define the core experience, make technical investments that improve quality and speed, and build teams that learn quickly from customers. We’re looking for someone with strong product judgment, technical depth, and the ability to turn an ambitious direction into focused execution. ## WHAT YOU’LL DO: - Own engineering strategy and execution for Retool’s Core AI Experience, connecting the longer-term product vision to clear priorities and measurable customer outcomes. - Partner with Product and Design to shape how users build, edit, debug, and iterate on software with AI—from their first interaction through ongoing use. - Partnership and collaboration with GTM teams on product launches, positioning, and sales strategy. - Lead and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, building clear ownership and strong collaboration across teams. - Set a high bar for product quality, including the reliability, responsiveness, and usability of AI interactions. - Guide architectural decisions across the user experience, application state, AI orchestration, and connections to the broader Retool platform. - Build effective ways to evaluate AI behavior, combining customer feedback, product data, and systematic evaluations to understand whether changes improve the experience. - Help teams balance rapid experimentation with the engineering foundations needed to support increasingly complex customer use cases. - Work closely with platform and infrastructure partners to ensure the core experience works within enterprise requirements for data access, permissions, and governance. - Stay close to customers and the work, helping teams resolve ambiguity, make tradeoffs, and ship. ## THE SKILLSET YOU’LL BRING: - Experience leading multiple product engineering teams, with a track record of developing managers and senior engineers. - Strong product instincts and experience partnering deeply with Product and Design to deliver intuitive, technically complex software. - Technical depth in interactive applications, developer tools, or similarly complex products where frontend experience and underlying systems are closely connected. - Experience shipping AI-powered products and understanding the challenges of model variability, latency, evaluation, and user trust. - The judgment to distinguish where experimentation will help a team learn and where a more durable technical investment is needed. - A track record of turning ambiguous opportunities into clear priorities, helping teams make progress as requirements evolve. - Strong communication and organizational leadership: you create alignment, surface risks early, and make decisions understandable. - A practical, involved leadership style. You can move between organizational strategy, technical reviews, and detailed product discussions as the work requires. - Experience with AI-assisted software creation, developer workflows, or enterprise software is especially relevant. ## About Retool ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Retool provides a platform for building, deploying, and managing custom internal software and AI applications by connecting to any database, API, or LLM. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series C) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2017 - **Founders**: David Hsu (CEO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Software Development, Enterprise Internal Tools, AI Application Platform - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise, SMB; specifically developers, IT teams, and business operators building internal software - **Mission or purpose**: To enable companies to build production-ready internal software and AI applications dramatically faster, with enterprise-grade security and governance, so that domain experts and developers alike can solve critical business problems. ## Products & Services - **Retool App Builder**: A low-code platform to build custom internal apps (dashboards, admin panels, CRUD tools) by connecting to databases and APIs. Type: SaaS/Platform. - **Retool Workflows**: A visual automation tool to build and orchestrate complex business processes and backend logic. Type: SaaS/Platform. - **Retool AI**: An AI-powered app generation capability that transforms natural language into production-ready applications, agents, and workflows, integrating with any LLM. Type: AI Feature/Platform. - **Retool Mobile**: A solution to build and deploy internal mobile apps from the same Retool platform. Type: SaaS/Platform. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (last round was Series C). - **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $5 million (as per LinkedIn company data); Total Funding of $141.3 million. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sequoia Capital (lead), Nat Friedman, John Collison, Daniel Gross. Customers include Amazon, Stripe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness. - **Growth Signals**: Over 10,000 organizations use Retool. The company has automated over 100 million hours of work. It has 6 offices across the US and UK. Despite a recent headcount reduction (-11% YoY), it maintains a strong brand in the enterprise internal tools space and is aggressively pivoting into AI-powered app generation. ## Competitive Advantages - **Enterprise Governance from Day One**: Unlike point solutions, apps built in Retool are production-ready and pass security reviews, eliminating the need for rebuilds or audit scrambles. - **Deep Data Connectivity**: Securely connects to existing databases, APIs, and internal systems, ensuring apps run on real data with real permissions. - **Unified Platform**: One platform to manage, orchestrate, and scale all internal apps, agents, and workflows, providing centralized visibility and governance for IT. - **Trusted by Large Enterprises**: A strong customer base of high-profile companies (Amazon, Stripe, Brex) serves as a powerful validation of its enterprise readiness. ## Strategic Focus - **AI as the Core Platform**: Retool is positioning itself as the "first enterprise AppGen platform," where AI is used to generate production-ready code from natural language, expanding the definition of "developer" to include analysts and operators. - **Scaling Enterprise Features**: The company is focused on building out governance, security, and platform capabilities to support large-scale deployments across complex organizations. - **International Expansion**: With offices in London and a German-speaking Sales Engineer role, Retool is actively expanding its presence in the European market. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: The company values ambition, intense curiosity, energy, and deep care. They emphasize moving fast, acting like an owner, and being both demanding and supportive. - **Work Environment**: Hybrid model with offices in San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City, and London. The company believes great work happens when teams collaborate in person. - **Product Impact**: Employees are close to the product and use Retool internally, giving them a direct voice in improving it. The mission is to enable a wider community of builders to create production-grade software safely. - **Hiring Process**: Structured, with initial recruiter/hiring manager chats, a technical evaluation or practical exercise, and a final round of 3–5 interviews. The company aims for transparency and candidate preparation. - **Employee Sentiment**: Employer rating of 3.4/5.0 (127 reviews). Strengths include Work-Life Balance (4.1) and Culture (3.7). Compensation (3.4) and Career (3.4) are areas for potential improvement. ## Sources 1. [retool.com](https://retool.com/) 2. [retool.com/careers](https://retool.com/careers) 3. [retool.com/about](https://retool.com/about) 4. [linkedin.com/company/tryretool](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryretool) 5. 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