Community Support Engineer

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:
Our customer base continues to grow quickly and we've expanded our product offerings beyond our core product. As a result we have more questions, feedback, and tickets coming in from developers using Retool than ever before. As we continue to grow, we're adding customer-centric Support Engineers focused on providing technical advice in public spaces (like our Developer Forum) to help our customers build the systems and tools they need to run their business. We're building and curating an active developer community of folks who love to build, and also love to share knowledge to help their fellow builders achieve their goals with Retool.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:
As a Community Support Engineer at Retool you'll communicate high-quality, informative technical solutions for developers at organizations of all sizes in publicly accessible spaces that should unblock thousands of builders in the future. You'll help answer their more difficult Retool development questions, troubleshoot connecting to many kinds of databases or APIs, and debug emerging issues. Often this will mean researching new topics and reporting back to customers on the best approach to achieve their goals. You'll track and share trends in product feedback internally with Engineering and Product. You'll also notice patterns and common themes in what developers need help on, and turn that into useful "how to" guidance and demo apps published as Retool Tips & Tricks.
Retool is a broad technical product, so ideally you are a generalist engineer and enjoy learning new technologies. Our platform supports over 30 integrations officially, so you'll constantly be encountering novel situations. On a typical day you might help someone debug a database connection, unblock launching a new instance of Retool on a customer's cloud provider, write examples of Javascript code for specific customer use cases, troubleshoot data structures, SQL queries, and API authentication - often live in our Community Office Hours, or via replies on our community forum.
WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH:
You'll collaborate with the Community Support team based in San Francisco, along with other support and software engineers. You'll diagnose, troubleshoot, and solve customer problems, train new team members, and encourage active community developers to contribute.
Community Support rolls up to the larger Support org, which is still a small close-knit team despite spanning SF, NYC and London. You'll be joining a broader team of Retools who are passionate about serving our customers, enjoy collaborating to build an incredibly innovative product, and approach the unknown with a sense of curiosity and humility. If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you!
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Interact with users every day via our Developer Forum , and via live Office Hours in Discord a few times per week
• Advise customers on questions around performance and development workflows, and debug issues with JavaScript, SQL, many different database types, and APIs
• Explore our codebase, logs, and test instances to debug difficult problems
• Maintain and curate our Developer Forum to reflect our brand and product. We want it to feel active, useful and accessible to our customers!
• Expand the concept of support beyond 1:1 help, to written content that is available to many users going forward and caters to different learning styles. For example, contribute to our Retool Tips & Tricks
• Advocate for improvements in content creation, tooling, and analysis to enhance documentation and our overall public knowledge experience
• Represent customers internally and advocate for key issues with Engineering and Product
• Seek opportunities to facilitate developer engagement with the product, for example by asking builders' thoughts about a new feature during Office Hours, or prompting customer feedback when discussing features on the forum
• Analyze and improve our support process - there're always new Retool apps to build, and processes to design as we scale the 1:many support function
• Track support metrics and share findings

THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING:

• 2+ years of experience in a Support Engineering, engineering, advocacy, or educational role, such as creating technical content or leading a community of developers through forums and events.
• Intermediate understanding of JavaScript and web development
• Experience supporting a SQL or NoSQL database management system
• Familiarity with API and Identity authentication methods (i.e. OAuth 2.0, Okta, and/or SAML)
• Ability to lead troubleshooting calls and interact with customers live to advise on how to use the Retool product to achieve their goals, inspect secure networks to help solve specific issues, etc.
• Effective communication skills in English, both in writing and verbally
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to non-obvious problems.
• Empathy towards customer challenges and a user-first mindset, actively seeking to collaborate with stakeholders to ensure satisfaction and understand their needs
• Strong passion for education and a builder mentality, actively empowering others through teaching
• Demonstrated ability to listen before speaking, actively promoting and uplifting subject-matter experts to build a community
• Ideally familiar with at least one major cloud provider (i.e. AWS, Azure, or GC) as well as Docker and/or Kubernetes

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.