---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Automations at Retool'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-automations-retool-san-francisco-b7m78hs1x77m'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Engineering Manager, Automations at Retool

- **Company:** Retool
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $260k–$360k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/retool/am9icG9zdDqOPpSvRgJh71-Tgn_9Ng-5

## Job description

## WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU:

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead Retool’s Automation team—the team building the next generation of workflows, integrations, and AI-driven agents. Your team will expand Retool beyond internal apps into end-to-end process orchestration, helping customers automate everything from backend operations to complex workflows across their businesses.

This work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, developer experience, and applied AI. As customers build increasingly powerful automated systems, they need ways to control when AI acts autonomously, keep humans in the loop, and understand what happens when something goes wrong. Your team will build the execution infrastructure and product experiences that make these systems useful, reliable, and trustworthy in production. You’ll lead engineers through technically complex, open-ended problems, balancing rapid experimentation with the long-term architectural soundness of the platform. Working closely with Product, Design, and go-to-market partners, you’ll help set the team’s direction, make clear tradeoffs, and turn emerging customer needs into scalable automation capabilities. You’ll also build direct relationships with customers to understand their workflows, where they encounter friction, and what they need to automate more of their business.

At Retool, we emphasize the word “leader.” We’re looking for someone who takes ownership, gets decisions made, keeps the team’s energy and tempo up, and continuously improves the environment for our engineers. You’ll pair strong technical judgment with thoughtful people leadership, helping engineers grow while setting a high bar for execution, reliability, and customer impact.

## IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

- Lead a fullstack team building Retool’s automation capabilities, including workflows, integrations, and AI-driven agents.
- Partner with Product and Design to define the team’s strategy and roadmap, connecting technical investments to customer needs and business impact.
- Guide technical design and architecture across workflow execution, state management, service integrations, observability, and system reliability.
- Help shape how AI agents operate in production, including autonomous execution, human oversight, debugging, and recovery when things go wrong.
- Drive execution from scoping through launch and iteration, making tradeoffs, resolving dependencies, and balancing experimentation with reliable delivery.
- Work directly with customers and go-to-market partners to understand complex business processes and translate them into reusable automation capabilities.
- Support engineers through continuous feedback, coaching, growth opportunities, and clear performance expectations.
- Build processes that improve delivery and cross-team collaboration, and partner with Recruiting to grow a diverse team of exceptional engineers.

## THE SKILLSET YOU’LL BRING:

- 2+ years of experience successfully leading and managing engineering teams.
- Strong technical judgment; we don’t expect you to code regularly, but you should be able to navigate our codebase and engage deeply in design and architecture decisions.
- A track record of setting technical direction and delivering complex systems, ideally involving workflows, distributed systems, integrations, or developer-facing products.
- Strong product instincts: the ability to connect technical decisions to customer needs, shape priorities with Product, and identify capabilities that serve multiple use cases.
- A point of view on AI-driven automation and what it takes to make intelligent systems useful and dependable in production.
- Sound judgment when balancing delivery speed, system reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Experience coaching engineers, managing performance, and recruiting and building strong teams.
- A propensity to operate as a business owner, caring deeply about our customers, product, and team.
- Comfort navigating ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and holding yourself and others accountable.
- Clear, direct communication and the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, design, and go-to-market teams.

## 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. [jobs.gem.com/retool](https://jobs.gem.com/retool)

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