Engineering Manager, Automations

Retool • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Retool is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead its Automation team, which builds workflows, integrations, and AI-driven agents. The team is expanding Retool beyond internal apps into end-to-end process orchestration, enabling customers to automate backend operations and complex business workflows.

The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, developer experience, and applied AI. The manager will guide development of execution infrastructure and product experiences that make automated systems reliable and trustworthy in production, including ways to manage autonomous AI actions, maintain human oversight, and understand and recover from failures.

The Engineering Manager will lead engineers through technically complex, open-ended problems, balancing experimentation with sound long-term architecture. In partnership with Product, Design, go-to-market teams, and customers, this person will set direction, make tradeoffs, translate customer needs into scalable automation capabilities, and support engineers’ growth. Retool values leaders who take ownership, make decisions, sustain team momentum, and continuously improve the engineering environment.

Requirements

• At least 2 years of experience successfully leading and managing engineering teams.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to navigate a codebase and engage deeply in design and architecture decisions; regular coding is not expected.
• A track record of setting technical direction and delivering complex systems.
• Strong product instincts, including connecting technical decisions to customer needs, shaping priorities with Product, and identifying 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 in balancing delivery speed, system reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience coaching engineers, managing performance, recruiting, and building strong teams.
• A business-owner mindset and deep care for customers, product, and team.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and holding oneself and others accountable.
• Clear, direct communication and the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, design, and go-to-market teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with workflows, distributed systems, integrations, or developer-facing products.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Partner with Recruiting to grow a diverse team of exceptional engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed