Staff Copywriter

Retool; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 157,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Retool is seeking a senior copywriter to define and scale Retool’s brand voice across products and campaigns. You will collaborate with design, marketing, product, and engineering to craft clear, compelling language for developers, operators, and business users.

This role lives within the Brand Design team, influencing global voice and tone decisions. You will write end-to-end copy, iterate through research findings, and push for innovative, differentiated storytelling in a fast-growing startup

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years of copywriting experience in-house or at an agency.
• Experience shaping brand voice across multiple surfaces (web, print, video, campaigns).
• Portfolio demonstrating strong work with a focus on voice and tone systems.
• Ability to translate technical concepts into clear, engaging language for developers and business users.
• Proven collaboration with design, marketing and product teams to meet project goals.

Responsibilities

• Partner with design, marketing, product and engineering to create a consistent brand experience across channels.
• Write copy end-to-end for various outputs and formats.
• Maintain and expand a flexible voice and tone system for Retool.
• Collaborate with the brand team to express Retool’s voice across experiences.

Skills

Brand voice

Copywriting

Voice & tone system

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical audience

Editing

Job description

About Retool

Nearly every company in the world runs on custom software for critical operations like tracking performance metrics, handling support workflows, building admin dashboards, and countless processes you might never have thought of. But most companies don't have the resources to properly invest in these tools, leading to a lot of old, clunky internal software, or worse, teams still stuck in manual and spreadsheet workflows.

AI has changed who gets to build software. The definition of "developer" now includes analysts, operators, and domain experts creating solutions directly—and the tools they reach for are multiplying by the week. That's both an opportunity and a challenge: as more people build with more AI tools, the risk of shipping ungoverned software into production grows just as fast.

At Retool, we're building the platform that makes all of it safe to ship. Build with any AI tool you want, then deploy into one place that connects to your real business data, enforces enterprise policies automatically, and lets teams create once and reuse everywhere with shared, trusted components. The cost of building software has collapsed. The cost of governing it hasn't—and that's the problem we solve.

Developers and domain experts have already automated over 100 million hours of work on our platform, freeing them to focus on creative problem-solving and strategic work that drives real business value. The people closest to the problem can now build the software to solve it, safely, and within enterprise guardrails.

Let’s build the future together.

Design At Retool

As a creative team we make daily decisions that will affect millions of people, from those creating software to the end-users who operate it every day. Instead of designing just one product, we’re effectively designing unique software products for thousands of companies across many different verticals.

This also presents a unique design challenge. Because there are almost endless possibilities to what you can build in Retool, we don’t have absolute control over how our users experience the product. We’re constantly seeking just the right balance between convention and configuration, between technical expressiveness and conceptual simplicity.

About The Role

Retool’s voice is very much still in a moldable state, even more so with recent evolutions in our products capabilities, with massive potential to expand and grow in how it shows up across all the work we ship. As a copywriter you will play a critical role in helping explore and define what that future looks like. You’ll advocate for a consistent voice and tone while still finding opportunities to break out and explore new ways of how we express ourselves, with an iterative mindset that explores conceptual opportunities to make our brand stand out in an oversaturated market of shared language. We’re not interested in playing it safe—we want to win the hearts and minds of developers, builders, entrepreneurs and more. This position sits within our Brand Design team as a part of a central design org with appropriate visibility and access to senior leaders to create business wide impact.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU'LL

• Partner with design, marketing, product and engineering to create an extraordinary brand experience across retool.com, brand and marketing campaigns, branded content moments, events, in-product experiences, etc
• Write copy for end-to-end
• Help maintain and expand a flexible voice and tone system for Retool that scales to meet the needs of the business
• Collaborate within the brand team to establish how Retool’s voice is strategically expressed across all experiences, working alongside designers from concept through execution rather than purely writing following finished layouts
• Act as a champion for the brand and how our voice is applied globally
• Work with cross-functional partners to translate technical concepts into clear, compelling language that earns the respect of users without talking down to them or hiding behind buzz word jargon
• Brief and collaborate with external partners for various needs across content, video, editorial, campaigns and other agency engagements to execute projects with consistent quality bar
• Write through iteration, experimentation and utilizing documented research findings
• Ensure consistency in brand language across all marketing channels while seeking opportunities to experiment and grow the capabilities of our voice
• Be an active participant in design at Retool, providing thoughtful feedback across design and product teams in critiques, reviews, and more

The Skillset You’ll Bring

• Minimum of 10 years of experience in copywriting in-house or in an agency setting
• Experience and understanding of the formal elements of writing for brand—including headline craft, narrative structure, editorial standards and how copy behaves inside various layout considerations
• A creative focus on writing applied across various surfaces such as web, environmental experiences, print and digital campaigns, video, product, etc.
• Passion for brand voice, demonstrable through a portfolio of strong work in a variety of contexts and execution with a focus on voice and tone systems
• Experience working with a technical audience, or a demonstrated ability to get smart on complex products quickly—developer tools experience is a plus
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively
• A curiosity to stay educated on the latest tools and techniques, tempered by a desire to establish an original, opinionated voice—not following trends
• A track record of successfully collaborating with design, marketing and business partners to translate project needs, audience insights, and constraints into informed creative decisions
• An ability to balance many simultaneous projects, independently prioritize work based on project objectives and business goals, and thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth startup environment
• A proactive, self-starter work ethic with the ability to operate independently within a small team; Thoughtful, empathetic and creative.
• Secondary skills are a huge plus! Editing, content strategy, information architecture, scriptwriting, etc.

For candidates based in the United States, 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 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.

The base pay range for this role is $157,000 – $235,000 per year.

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.