Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

retool; San Francisco, New York (CA, NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Retool is seeking an SRE to own reliability across Retool Cloud and self-hosted deployments. You will drive automation, upgrades, migrations, and observability to reduce toil and improve customer outcomes.

The role emphasizes operating production systems in AWS, strong Kubernetes skills, and IaC expertise to stabilise and scale enterprise deployments.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience operating production infrastructure in AWS.
• Strong Kubernetes fundamentals and incident response experience.
• Real Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Solid PostgreSQL knowledge and database operational judgement.
• Ability to write reliable automation and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own reliability across Retool Cloud and self-hosted paths, including provisioning, upgrades and migrations.
• Build automation for Terraform runs, environment updates, upgrade workflows, and migrations.
• Improve observability and translate health signals into actionable guidance.
• Design safe deployment, upgrade, and rollback paths for customers.
• Collaborate with product engineers on infrastructure requirements for new products.
• Lead through ambiguity and communicate clearly under rapid changes.
• Write docs, runbooks, and migration guides for complex systems.

Skills

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

PostgreSQL

IaC

Go

Python

TypeScript

Job description

WHY WE'RE LOOKING FOR YOU:

Good software has to run where customers need it. For many of Retool's largest customers, that means running Retool in their own infrastructure, behind their own controls, with the reliability and operational clarity they would expect from any critical system.

Retool's Core Infrastructure team owns the systems that make this possible: Retool Cloud, managed single tenant environments, BYOC (bring-your-own-cloud) environments, Kubernetes and Helm deployments, Docker Compose, and the migration paths between them. It is a broad surface area, and it is one of the biggest levers we have for making Retool work for enterprise customers.

The work is not clean-room infrastructure. Customers run different clouds, different versions, different deployment models, and different levels of operational maturity. A bad upgrade experience can leave a customer many versions behind. A manual Terraform run can become the bottleneck during a launch or incident.

We are hiring SREs who want to turn that mess into leverage. You will help us reduce customer toil, automate upgrades and infrastructure changes, build reliability tooling across Retool Cloud and customer‑owned environments, and make Retool easier to deploy and operate at enterprise scale. The strongest candidates are comfortable debugging Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Postgres, networking, and deployment problems, then stepping back and building the automation or product surface that prevents the same problem from happening again.

What you'll do:

• Own reliability across Retool Cloud, managed single tenant, BYOC, and self-hosted deployment paths, including provisioning, upgrades, migrations, configuration changes, and production escalations.
• Build the automation that turns today's manual infrastructure work into repeatable systems: Terraform runs, customer environment updates, upgrade workflows, secret rotations, and migration steps.
• Improve observability for Retool Cloud, self-hosted customers, and internal operators. We care less about exposing every metric and more about turning health signals into clear status, likely causes, and recommended actions.
• Design safer deployment, upgrade, and rollback paths so Cloud and managed customers can stay current
• Help move customers from legacy or less-supported deployment models toward supported paths such as Retool's official deployment paths (Blueprints, Kubernetes, and Helm), with migration flows that are repeatable enough for customers, Support, and TAMs to trust.
• Partner with product engineers on infrastructure requirements for new Retool products, especially when they introduce new dependencies
• Lead through ambiguity, make careful risk calls, and communicate clearly while things are moving quickly.
• Write the docs, runbooks, design notes, and migration guides that make complex systems understandable to other engineers and to customers.

What we're looking for:

Infrastructure fundamentals

• Deep experience operating production infrastructure in AWS.
• Experience improving reliability for customer-facing SaaS systems.
• Strong Kubernetes fundamentals.
• Real Terraform or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Good operational judgment around databases, especially Postgres.

Reliability and automation

• Experience building or operating observability systems.
• Programming ability in a language such as Go, Python, TypeScript, Java, or Ruby.
• A bias toward automation. If you find yourself doing the same operational task twice, you should start thinking about the interface, workflow, or tool that eliminates the third time.

Customer and team judgment

• Clear written communication.
• Comfort working directly with customer-facing teams and, when useful, customers themselves.

What makes SREs successful here:

You will do well here if you like infrastructure that sits close to real customer pain. Some days that means debugging a specific customer environment. Other days it means improving Retool Cloud reliability or designing the migration path so the next 25 customers do not need that same debugging session.

We value SREs who are ambitious, curious, energetic, and careful with the details. Retool moves quickly, priorities can change, and the systems are not always as clean as we want them to be. The work needs SREs who can get their hands dirty, tell the truth about tradeoffs, and leave the system better than they found it.