Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Retool with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 60% positive. To compare, the company-average is 54.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 20 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Retool overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Retool as a Software Engineer according to 20 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 37%
One on one interview: 23%
Skills test: 14%
Personality test: 6%
Background check: 6%
Drug test: 3%
Presentation: 3%
Group panel interview: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 3%
Other: 3%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
The first hour long interview is two leetcode questions, a medium followed by a hard. The recruiter will tell you it's not leetcode, but it is. The person who interviewed me in the first round was disengaged. I had not seen the problem before, so I calmly suggested potential solutions with the expectation that we would bounce ideas back and forth. However, he completely shut me down, telling me that if I thought I had a solution, I should just start coding it up. I would try my best to explain the thought process behind my algorithm, but he verbatim told me that "I have no idea what this is doing" and just told me to run test cases. We finally reached the solution to the first question after I debugged in silence since the interviewer wasn't really doing anything but staring at my code. On the second question, a leetcode hard, another question I had never seen before, I again sat in silence as he told me to code up what I thought was the solution (after attempting to bounce ideas back and forth again). We reached the end of the interview without a complete solution, and he asked me vague questions and condescendingly told me that this was not the way to do it. Very negative experience.
The second interview was more reflective of what you might do on the job as a front-end engineer, but the negative impression from the first interview kept me under pressure and I blundered some basic rendering concepts.
The fact that they do two 1-hour screens before the onsite is also definitely a waste of time
Recruiter call, talked about myself, my skills, why Retool
Good to practice especially if going with the frontend programming route
Scheduled 2 technical interviews. One in React to build a form and one to implement wordle's algorithms in language of choice
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Retool in Sep 2025
Interview
Virtual: Recruiter screen, technical screen (coding & system design)
Option to come into the office for onsite: 2 coding, project deep dive, and hiring manager/behavioral
Enjoyable process - easy to schedule. Coding questions were pretty interesting and interviewers were very warm and friendly. I was very nervous for the technical coding screen and really appreciated how nice and calming the interviewer was!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LC medium for the technical coding screen - the rest of the coding questions felt fairly practical, fun, and iterative
The interview process did not reflect well on the company culture and people, despite my positive initial impressions. It is the worst interview experience I've had this job search amongst 16 companies.
First off, the recruiter said my technical interview wasn't going to be a LC question and they valued practical coding. I prepped for practical coding interviews, but during the phone screen it turned out to be exactly one of the classic LC questions. The interviewer was not only super disengaged (mostly silent during the interview), but also came off super arrogant, which triggered a mild panic attack that contributed to me not performing well.
The entire system design interview happened on Google docs. I was not prepped on this either, so I spent most of the hour wondering when we would switch to Excalidraw. The system design interviewer was cordial, but it was also a bit chaotic trying to nail down all the requirements. I remember being met with skepticism when I told them that a Postgres DB should be able to handle 30 RPS of search queries. The skepticism was so palpable that for a second I thought I had messed up somewhere, but in hindsight I believe it's because I didn't say the answer they were expecting and the assumptions around scale that we've agreed to painted them into a corner where simpler technological solutions could satisfy the requirements.
I really want to believe my interview experience doesn't reflect the inner-reality of the culture at Retool, but given the interview experience, I fear that this interview experience would turn away good people whom I would want to work with.