Software Engineer, Governance

Job title: Software Engineer, Governance

About the Role

On the Governance team, you will help build the foundational layer between builders and data—policies, access controls, audit trails, and security infrastructure that enterprise customers rely on to scale. This role spans from backend systems and data modeling to admin UX, ensuring features are secure, auditable, and easy for thousands of users to configure.

What You'll Do

• Design and build the Data Access Control Layer across Retool's database connectors, including policy modeling, query rewriting to enforce security constraints, and the admin UX that makes complex rules intuitive to configure.

• Redesign how administrators onboard and manage Retool. Build the landing page experience, global search, and the guided setup flow that gets enterprises from sign-up to first production app faster. Surface security insights, flag under-authenticated resources, and create the admin dashboard that makes platform health visible at a glance, and build features that transform Retool into a self-managing, self-healing system with proper admin oversight and controls.

• Build the new organizational primitive for Retool: Projects group apps, agents, and workflows into a shared space with their own membership and role-based permissions. You'd design the data model, build the permissions layer, and create the UI that gives teams a clear home base, replacing a flat, unstructured console with something that scales to hundreds of teams.

• Build the Automated Security Center & Admin Control Panel: surface under-authenticated resources, flag potentially dangerous access patterns, monitor usage analytics and spend, and integrate with compliance and DLP tools so security and admin teams get actionable insights instead of raw data, and Retool gets smarter about protecting customers the more they use it.

• Create Spaces & Instance Management controls to govern multiple Retool Spaces and instances from a single pane of glass. Enforce organization-wide policies, like requiring all Spaces to use a specific SSO provider or AI configuration, and proactively identify misconfigurations or deviations from compliance requirements.

• What We're Looking For

• 2–8 years of professional software engineering experience.

• Experience owning technically challenging, cross-functional projects from start to finish.

• Strong fundamentals across the entire stack, with a strong grasp of backend systems design, data modeling, and building reliable, scalable software.

• Clear communication in design docs, code reviews, and cross-functional discussions.

• You care about code quality, testing, and leaving the codebase better than you found it.

• You’re motivated by solving real customer problems, not just writing clever code.

• Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Exposure to dbt, Databricks, or data pipeline tooling.

• Experience building authorization, access control, or security systems.