Job Description
WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU:
We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Retool’s Core AI Experience—the product experiences that help people turn business problems into working software with AI. You’ll shape how users go from an idea to an app or agent connected to real data, and how they test, refine, and confidently put what they build into use.
Building with AI changes what users expect from Retool. Getting to a first version should feel quick, but the experience also needs to hold up as requirements become more complex. Users need to understand what AI has built, guide its decisions, and move fluidly between generating software and editing it directly. Your teams will make those interactions intuitive, reliable, and useful for real business work.
This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, developer experience, and applied AI. You’ll partner closely with Product and Design to define the core experience, make technical investments that improve quality and speed, and build teams that learn quickly from customers. We’re looking for someone with strong product judgment, technical depth, and the ability to turn an ambitious direction into focused execution.
WHAT YOU’LL DO:
- Own engineering strategy and execution for Retool’s Core AI Experience, connecting the longer-term product vision to clear priorities and measurable customer outcomes.
- Partner with Product and Design to shape how users build, edit, debug, and iterate on software with AI—from their first interaction through ongoing use.
- Partnership and collaboration with GTM teams on product launches, positioning, and sales strategy.
- Lead and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, building clear ownership and strong collaboration across teams.
- Set a high bar for product quality, including the reliability, responsiveness, and usability of AI interactions.
- Guide architectural decisions across the user experience, application state, AI orchestration, and connections to the broader Retool platform.
- Build effective ways to evaluate AI behavior, combining customer feedback, product data, and systematic evaluations to understand whether changes improve the experience.
- Help teams balance rapid experimentation with the engineering foundations needed to support increasingly complex customer use cases.
- Work closely with platform and infrastructure partners to ensure the core experience works within enterprise requirements for data access, permissions, and governance.
- Stay close to customers and the work, helping teams resolve ambiguity, make tradeoffs, and ship.
THE SKILLSET YOU’LL BRING:
- Experience leading multiple product engineering teams, with a track record of developing managers and senior engineers.
- Strong product instincts and experience partnering deeply with Product and Design to deliver intuitive, technically complex software.
- Technical depth in interactive applications, developer tools, or similarly complex products where frontend experience and underlying systems are closely connected.
- Experience shipping AI-powered products and understanding the challenges of model variability, latency, evaluation, and user trust.
- The judgment to distinguish where experimentation will help a team learn and where a more durable technical investment is needed.
- A track record of turning ambiguous opportunities into clear priorities, helping teams make progress as requirements evolve.
- Strong communication and organizational leadership: you create alignment, surface risks early, and make decisions understandable.
- A practical, involved leadership style. You can move between organizational strategy, technical reviews, and detailed product discussions as the work requires.
- Experience with AI-assisted software creation, developer workflows, or enterprise software is especially relevant.
