Software Engineer, AI Product Engineer

Company: Retool Inc.
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: May 25, 2025

Job Description:

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!WHY WE'RE LOOKING FOR YOURetool started by addressing obstacles with internal tools and has grown into a company that solves internal tooling for thousands of companies (big and small). Now, with AI-native capabilities, we're going a step further: transforming how humans interact with software entirely.We're hiring AI Product Engineers to help us push the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs in the hands of developers. If you're passionate about building productized AI experiences-fast, reliable, and deeply usable-we want to talk.WHAT YOU'LL DOAs an AI Product Engineer, you'll work across product and infrastructure layers to ship developer-facing AI features that feel like magic-intelligent, fast, and deeply embedded into the act of building software. You might:

• Build generative UIs that let users create real apps from natural language
• Improve the performance, observability, and safety of our internal model architecture
• Extend our AI evaluation systems to support smarter ranking, feedback loops, and product metrics
• Develop patterns for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), few-shot prompting, and agentic architecture.
• Contribute to building internal tools that help us accelerate iteration on AI features and workflowsYou'll work in a TypeScript + Node.js + React stack, but we value strong engineering fundamentals over specific frameworks. You should be comfortable navigating the full stack, even if you lean more frontend or backend.THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING
  • 6+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • A track record of building and shipping real product-not just models or papers
  • Experience working with LLMs and modern techniques (RAG, CoT, few-shot, embeddings, etc.)
  • An eye for product: you care how features work and how they feel
  • Familiarity with vector databases, prompt orchestration tools, and evaluation techniques
  • A pragmatic mindset about what's scalable and maintainable in production
  • Strong opinions, weakly held-you move quickly but bring others along
  • Bonus: experience building AI features for developer tools or productivity software
    
    WHO YOU'LL WORK WITHYou'll join a small, fast-moving AI team inside Retool, working alongside engineers, designers, and PMs who've built everything from visual programming systems to compiler infrastructure. You'll also collaborate with our core product and infra teams as we deepen AI's role across the platform.We value ownership, speed, and a tight feedback loop with our customers (many of whom are developers themselves). This is a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of AI, developer experience, and product design-with real users, real use cases, and real impact.NICE TO HAVE
    • Experience with PostgreSQL
    • Exposure to MLOps techniques (e.g., fine-tuning pipelines, model hosting)
    • Experience mentoring other engineers or working closely with design
      
      READY TO BUILD THE FUTURE OF SOFTWARE?If you're excited to shape how developers build with AI-from prompts to production-we'd love to meet you.For candidates based in San Francisco, the pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents base salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings (OTE) for commissionable roles. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Retool and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors such as (but not limited to), scope and responsibilities, the candidate's experience and qualifications, and location.Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity, and/or commission/bonuses are dependent on the position offered. Retool provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.$164,600 - $255,000 USDRetool 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.
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Keywords: Retool Inc., Daly City , Software Engineer, AI Product Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California