Software Engineer, Governance

Retool•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

AI is making it possible for anyone to build software in minutes. But building fast and building safely are two very different things. As development democratizes and more people across an organization create apps, agents, and workflows, the risk surface expands dramatically. The question enterprises are asking isn't "can we build it?" but rather "can we trust what's been built?" On the Governance team, we're solving this problem by building the foundational layer that sits between builders and data. This is the policies, access controls, audit trails, and security infrastructure that make Retool the platform enterprises trust to scale across their entire organization. Your work will span the stack, from full-stack web development to data pipelines and product infrastructure. You'll focus on the problems that matter most to customers with thousands of employees on Retool: What slows them down? What keeps their security teams up at night? How do we make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard? This team is responsible for making Retool easily configurable for and deeply trusted by our largest customers. The Governance team owns the systems that make Retool secure, organized, and trustworthy at scale, from the data layer all the way up to how teams discover and manage their work.

Requirements

2–8 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally some of which you've spent at startups
Experience owning technically challenging, cross-functional projects from start to finish
Strong fundamentals across the entire stack, with a strong grasp of backend systems design, data modeling, and building reliable, scalable software
You communicate clearly in design docs, code reviews, and cross-functional discussions
You care about code quality, testing, and leaving the codebase better than you found it
You're motivated by solving real customer problems, not just writing clever code

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code practices
Exposure to dbt, Databricks, or data pipeline tooling
Experience building authorization, access control, or security systems
Experience with policy engines, query rewriting, or data governance platforms
Familiarity with RBAC, ABAC, or relationship-based access control models (Zanzibar, OPA, Cedar)
Familiarity with authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth, SAML, SCIM, or similar)
Experience designing taming complexity in admin-facing UIs or platform management tools

Responsibilities

Design and build the system that enforces table-level, column-level, and row-level access controls across Retool's database connectors.
Redesign how administrators onboard and manage Retool.
Build the new organizational primitive for Retool.
Build the intelligent layer that proactively keeps Retool secure and well-governed.
Build the controls that let enterprises govern multiple Retool Spaces and instances from a single pane of glass.