Engineering Manager, Automations
- Location
- San Francisco
- Workplace
- On-site
- Employment
- Full-time
About this role
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.
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