Engineering Manager, Automations

Retool•San Francisco, CA

12h•Hybrid

About The Position

Retool is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead its Automation team, which is building workflows, integrations, and AI-driven agents. The team is expanding Retool beyond internal apps into end-to-end process orchestration, helping customers automate backend operations and complex business workflows. The work spans platform engineering, developer experience, and applied AI, with a focus on building execution infrastructure and product experiences that make automated systems useful, reliable, and trustworthy in production. The Engineering Manager will lead engineers through technically complex, open-ended problems and balance rapid experimentation with long-term architectural soundness. In partnership with Product, Design, and go-to-market teams, this person will set direction, make tradeoffs, and turn customer needs into scalable automation capabilities. They will also build direct customer relationships to understand workflows and automation needs. Retool values leaders who take ownership, make decisions, maintain team momentum, and continuously improve the engineering environment. The role combines technical judgment and people leadership, supporting engineer growth while setting a high bar for execution, reliability, and customer impact.

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, ideally involving workflows, distributed systems, integrations, or developer-facing products.
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 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 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.

Responsibilities

Lead a full-stack team building Retool’s automation capabilities, including workflows, integrations, and AI-driven agents.
Partner with Product and Design to define team 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.