Software Engineer, Workflows

WHY WE'RE LOOKING FOR YOU

Retool started as a way to address obstacles with internal tools and has grown into a company that solves internal tooling for thousands of companies (big and small). We’ve done a lot with a little–we have a growing engineering team and a laundry list of features and foundational improvements we want to tackle. 

To continue our fast-paced growth, we need to build a world-class engineering team. You’ll help us get there by owning end-to-end projects, talking with customers, and ultimately supporting the growth of Retool the product and the business. 

WHAT YOU'LL DO 

Retool Workflows is the business automation layer of the Retool platform, designed to help engineers build, manage, and scale backend automations with both speed and flexibility. Workflows sits in the middle of the workflow automation spectrum—bridging the gap between lightweight visual builders (like Zapier) and developer-first automation tools (like Airflow).

Our customers use Workflows across four key use case categories:

1. Process automation – Streamlining approvals, ticketing, compliance checks, and other operational processes.
2. Metrics and alerting – Triggering notifications, monitoring key business events, and automating incident responses.
3. Data integration – Connecting, transforming, and synchronizing data across systems.
4. Backend-as-a-Service – Running headless backend tasks, lightweight APIs, and automation logic.

With Workflows, developers can work visually or in code, using pre-built primitives (Loops, Code Blocks, DB Connectors) or writing custom scripts in Python and JavaScript. Workflows provides event-based triggers, cron scheduling, error handling, and auto-retries—giving developers the tools they need to automate and scale mission-critical processes without the overhead of traditional infrastructure.

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

As an engineer, you will work closely with product and design teams to build, ship, and iterate new features. We’re a hard-working, passionate bunch who are motivated by collaboration, strong results, and bringing the impact of Retool to our customers. When we’re in the office, we enjoy eating lunch (and occasionally dinner!) together, and we’ve been known for our lively game nights. But at the root of it all, we come together to show our customers and not-quite-yet customers how Retool can make them and their companies more efficient and successful. If this sounds like a fit, we’d love to hear from you!

IN THIS ROLE YOU'LL:

• Improve the user experience of writing and maintaining business logic in Retool Workflows
• Build creative, innovative software development interfaces
• Integrate and unify the business logic experience in Retool, creating a cohesive, simple, and powerful platform
• Debug real customer problems + build features for them (e.g. "the Google Sheets integration doesn't support adding rows", and "what's the best way to support that? Via cell ranges, or via a lightweight, home-grown ORM?")
• Find extensible and reliable ways to extend Retool with AI
• Make our distributed compute layer more flexible, more performant, and more secure
• Help assess and recruit future engineers

THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING:

• You have 2+ years experience in professional software development, ideally some of which you’ve spent in startups
• You’ve built, maintained, debugged and scaled distributed systems products
• You have an an interest in rigorous, critical thinking about how to shape user-facing product offerings and features

NICE TO HAVE:

• You’re an expert with Typescript and Node.js
• You’ve designed complex data pipelines or asynchronous systems
• You’ve right-sized compute clusters, managed autoscaling groups, etc.
• You understand OS-level containerization and execution environments
• You’ve built fault-tolerant message queues, worker pools, or distributed value stores
• You’ve analyzed and tackled interesting and unusual new workloads