Software Engineer, Sandbox & Agent Executor
Summary
Build and own the agent platform behind Retool's AI products, including sandboxed agent execution, context/tool-use strategies, and evaluation systems that keep agentic features reliable in production. Full-stack work in TypeScript, Node.js, and React, plus Kubernetes-based infrastructure for agent workloads.
- Own the behavior of agentic features across multiple product surfaces, including quality, safety, variance, and failure modes, and shape the tool and harness surface agents operate against, including MCP servers, sub-agents, and skills
- Work across the product and infrastructure boundary, shaping agent behavior while understanding what it costs at runtime, and serve as the infrastructure team's technical counterpart on agent workloads
- Design and evolve prompting, context construction, retrieval, routing, and tool-use strategies for long-horizon workflows, and build the evaluation systems that measure them through statistical signals, distributions, and trends rather than pass/fail tests
- Detect, diagnose, and resolve non-deterministic failures such as hallucinations, partial correctness, instruction drift, or context sensitivity, working from transcripts and traces rather than logs alone
- Partner closely with product and infrastructure teams on how agent workloads are provisioned, isolated, and rolled out, including for self-hosted customers, and set the pattern for how we ship agentic products safely
- Accountable for agent behavior, not just system correctness
- Designing, Building, and Deploying agentic products in both cloud and self-hosted environments
- Grounded in evaluation, iteration, and regression prevention under non-determinism
- Comfortable designing systems where outputs vary, confidence is probabilistic, and correctness is contextual
- Adding LLM calls to existing features and moving on
- Shipping AI features without owning their long-term reliability, drift, or user trust
- An SRE role, though you'll own the agent-side bugs that surface as infrastructure incidents
- Model training or research, though you'll shape model behavior, selection, and tool design
- 6+ years of professional engineering experience, with ownership over complex systems in production
- Production experience with agentic systems, including context engineering, tool use, and evaluation frameworks, at real user scale rather than in pilots or demos
- Hands-on experience with sandboxing technology and running agents inside sandboxed environments
- Experience in Kubernetes or equivalent in practice (EKS, ECS, or similar), owning services end to end
- Strong systems thinking, with the instinct to use AI as an augment to engineering judgment rather than a replacement for it
- Curiosity in why a model produced what it did, and the habit of checking rather than assuming
- Experience mentoring engineers on this kind of work, including when to lean on a model and when not to
- Experience building for developer surfaces like CLIs, IDE extensions, or coding harnesses
- Experience shipping into enterprise or air-gapped environments, where you debug systems you can't directly observe