Software Engineer, Performance
Retool
ABOUT RETOOL:
Nearly every company in the world runs on custom business software: Gartner estimates that up to 50% of all code is written for internal usage. This is the operational software for refunding orders, underwriting loans, moderating content, managing marketplaces, rolling out new features, onboarding employees, analyzing transactions, providing customer support…the list is nearly endless. For most companies, building and maintaining all of these tools demands a lot of engineering time—scarce, expensive resources better put to use on customer-facing products.
At Retool, we’re designing a new type of development environment that makes it dramatically faster and easier to build all of this software. Retool unifies the ease of visual programming with the power of code, while abstracting away the tedious and repetitive tasks of development. We believe that the future of software development lies in being a force multiplier for developers and technical builders, helping them move considerably faster and build a lot more software. It’s akin to a new version of Visual Basic, HyperCard, or Flash—with a bit of Figma and some future-of-programming vibes thrown on top. 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.
WHY WE'RE LOOKING FOR YOU
Retool started as a way to address obstacles with internal tools and has grown into a company that solves internal tooling for thousands of companies (big and small). We’ve done a lot with a little: we have a growing engineering team and a laundry list of features and foundational improvements we want to tackle.
To continue our fast-paced growth, we need to build a world-class engineering team. You’ll help us get there by optimizing our stack to the nth degree. We believe performance is a feature, and have to ensure our product runs smoothly on all types of machines and network connections.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
We’re a tool built by engineers, for engineers. You'll work on features that impact Retool builders globally and have the power to change how applications are built across all parts of the stack. You’ll meet with internal counterparts to enhance customer thinking and partner closely with product on building out features. Your work plays a pivotal role in enhancing existing functionality and shipping new features — optimizing the performance of our customers' applications at every turn.
Retool is built primarily in JavaScript and TypeScript, Node.js on the backend, and React on the frontend. We’re looking for someone with a thorough understanding of at least one of these technologies, and an appetite for going deep into the weeds. We want an opinionated builder, someone who has seen the issues with hyperscaling this stack, and is ready to institute the necessary upgrades.
WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH
As a performance engineer, you will work closely with other product engineers and the infra team to build, ship, and iterate on optimizations. We’re a hard-working, passionate bunch who are motivated by collaboration, strong results, and bringing the impact of Retool to our customers. When we’re in the office, we enjoy eating lunch (and occasionally dinner!) together, and we’ve been known for our lively game nights. But at the root of it all, we come together to show our customers — and not-quite-yet customers — how Retool can make them and their companies more efficient and successful. If this sounds like a fit, we’d love to hear from you!
IN THIS ROLE YOU'LL
- Drive step-change performance wins in Retool’s core runtime environment
- Bring technologies like WebAssembly and edge compute from theory to practice
- Rethink best practices, push the boundaries of what is possible in the web browser
- Work closely with other engineers at Retool to incentivize behaviors that are beneficial for performance
- Stay up-to-date, and perhaps contribute to the latest tools and technologies that are enabling other engineers to build high performing apps
THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING
- 6+ years experience in professional software development
- 3+ years experience in web performance
- You have strong programming and data science fundamentals
- Strong React or systems-level experience (Node, Deno, V8, WebKit etc.)
- You’re self-directed and comfortable working autonomously
- You’re able to work with ambiguity, helping navigate to successful outcomes
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience working on web standards or on browser teams (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox etc.)
- Experience writing web apps that use technologies like WASM, web workers and edge compute to improve performance
- Deep understanding of JS build systems like webpack and esbuild
Retool offers generous benefits to all employees. For more information, please visit the benefits and perks section of our careers page!
At this time, Retool is only set up to employ in the US and UK.
