Design Engineering Manager

ABOUT RETOOL

Nearly every company in the world runs on custom software: Gartner estimates that up to 50% of all code is written for internal use. This is the operational software for refunding orders, underwriting loans, onboarding employees, analyzing transactions, and providing customer support. But most companies don’t have adequate resources to properly invest in these tools, leading to a lot of old and clunky internal software or, even worse, users still stuck in manual and spreadsheet flows. 

At Retool, we’re on a mission to bring good software to everyone. We’re building a new type of development platform that combines the benefits of traditional software development with a drag-and-drop UI editor and AI, making it dramatically faster to build internal tools. We believe that the future of software development lies in abstracting away the tedious and repetitive tasks developers waste time on, while creating reusable components that act as a force multiplier for future developers and projects. The result is not just productivity, but good software by default. And that’s a mission worth striving for. 

Today, our customers span from small startups building their first operational tools to Fortune 500 companies building mission-critical apps for thousands of users across their business. Interested in joining us? Let us know! 

ABOUT RETOOL

Internal tools are the invisible glue that holds most companies together. Often these tools are quite overlooked and underinvested in—and we think they could be much much better. At Retool, we believe that everyone deserves to use great software, so we’ve created a way for developers to make highly effective internal tools remarkably fast. Whether it’s refunding orders, underwriting loans, managing marketplaces, rolling out new features, analyzing transactions, or providing customer support, Retool makes it dramatically faster and easier to build internal tools that teams need to thrive.

We believe that the future of software development lies in being a force multiplier for the people building it, and giving great tools to the end-users who have to live in them all day. This means helping folks move considerably faster so they can focus on what matters most to them, their business, and their customers.

DESIGN ENGINEERING AT RETOOL
Retool’s Brand Design team is a mix of creative optimists, systems-thinkers, technologists, and tinkerers that work across web, brand systems, and design engineering to solve some of the trickiest problems in software. We’re designing a technical product—the tools that build the tools—used by developers at thousands of companies across many different industries and applications. A technical center of excellence is accordingly quite important to us, and we’re seeking an experienced leader to support our very talented team of design engineers who focus on Retool’s web presence and nascent design systems. 

No matter where a visitor lands—retool.com, our blog, community, learning resources, or documentation—we want to create a cohesive interactive experience that reflects the power, flexibility, and speed of Retool. Our external web properties are the earliest steps in the customer journey, and we want to ensure that our components, visual language, and standards carry through seamlessly into the product itself. 

Working closely with partners in Marketing, this team owns the frontend craft of our websites and ensures that there’s a fast, efficient, and reliable technology platform on which to develop and deploy, edit content, run experiments, and measure usage. We have a deep love for the grain of the web and high expectations, so we expect our sites to be highly informative, incredibly performant, and visually stunning.

As our brand and product languages evolve, this team will also work with our Brand Design, Product Design and Engineering teams to help expand and encourage adoption of both marketing and product-focused design systems.

ABOUT THE ROLE
We are looking for an experienced design engineering manager who can shape the craft and operations of this new team and lead its IC design engineers.

You’ll lead and inspire the individuals on your team to make effective decisions using their individual expertise, supporting their work while accelerating their growth with strong technical leadership. You’ll oversee our current tech stack and infrastructure to ensure it scales with our aggressive goals and enables us to ship reliably and with high velocity. In partnership with Design and Marketing leadership, you’ll devise and deliver on quarterly and yearly roadmaps focused on strategic objectives for the business.

Most importantly, you’ll lead a team that sweats the details: whether it’s implementing a complex animation or interaction, shaving seconds off of time-to-interactive, or improving the reliability of the build pipeline.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU'LL:

• Develop the long-term vision and strategy for the team, prioritize according to business objectives, and create an execution roadmap
• Partner with your producer to manage processes which empower the team to focus on the most impactful work and engage effectively with the rest of Retool
• Help your team focus on what they do best, and give them the opportunities to sharpen the skills they’re looking to develop
• Evaluate and own the tech stack and infrastructure for our web presence and ensure supports our shipping cadence and it scales with our goals
• Collaborate with marketing to shape our content infrastructure, optimize relevance for our technical audience, and integrate with the tools that power Retool’s go-to-market plans, always advocating for proactive decision making vs reactive, short term solutions
• Think holistically about design systems across brand/marketing and product, help to formulate a strategy, and drive optimizations and adoption across all of Retool 
• Build a culture that makes space for technical and creative expression, advocating for experimentation in tooling, execution and code improvements while maintaining the support of business objectives

THE SKILLSET YOU’LL BRING:

• Experience in driving business and product success in a highly cross-functional organization, working closely with partners like producers, interactive designers, product & growth marketers and content partners
• A proven track record for leading and scaling engineering teams, defining a mission, setting and executing on goals that equate to positive impact for the business
• Experience leading teams of 5+ individual contributors, with specific experience focused on a team supporting a marketing site
• Familiarity with Next.JS and React development, the latest in TypeScript practices, Vercel toolkit, and Sanity CMS
• Experience building and driving adoption of design systems, finding the right balance between enforcing consistency and maintaining team velocity
• A strong attention to technical details and an understanding of design craft through detail that manifests in a modern, high-performing and stable retool.com
• The ability to thrive with a high level of autonomy and responsibility in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment

Retool offers generous benefits to all employees and hybrid work location. For more information, please visit the benefits and perks section of our careers page!

Retool is currently set up to employ all roles in the US and specific roles in the UK. To find roles that can be employed in the UK, please refer to our careers page and review the indicated locations.