Staff Software Engineer, Toast
Voice AI Platform
$151-309k
Plus equity. Salary dependent on location
Point of sale and management system for restaurants
Be an early applicant
Point of sale and management system for restaurants
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$151-309k
Plus equity. Salary dependent on location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Toast's mission is to enrich the food experience for all.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or Kotlin
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
- Experience developing AI-integrated products or features, with a practical understanding of how to ship and iterate on systems that incorporate LLMs or other AI capabilities
- Experience building and reasoning about AI-powered systems, including nondeterminism, evaluation strategies, observability, and cost management
- Experience shipping complex, mission-critical production services and owning them long-term
- Track record of leading multi-person and multi-team projects end-to-end, from design through rollout
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and production reliability
- Basic familiarity with frontend development
- Strong cross-team communication and collaboration skills; able to influence direction without formal authority both within your team and across the broader organization
- Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) in day-to-day development and have caused others to become more proficient with AI coding tools
- Experience with voice or conversational AI platforms is a plus, but not required
What the job involves
- Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Voice AI Team
- On the Voice AI Team, our mission is to build and operate the voice platform that powers Toast and to ship novel applications on top of it that create real value across Toast's customer base
- This is a greenfield space where the platform and its use cases are being defined together, and the work you do here will be foundational to how Toast uses voice AI for years to come
- As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll take ownership of significant projects end-to-end: designing systems, driving execution across the team, and making the technical decisions that shape how the platform grows
- You'll work closely with product, engineering, and stakeholders across Toast to turn ambiguous problems into reliable, scalable systems
- Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable backend services, applications, and core platform components supporting Toast's Voice AI platform used across teams
- Conceive and lead complex, cross-cutting projects from design through production, owning outcomes and driving alignment across stakeholders and across a broad range of stakeholders
- Shape the technical direction on your team and beyond by making architectural decisions, defining patterns, and reducing complexity for the engineers and teams that depend on your work
- Build and evolve integrations with AI platforms and internal Toast systems, making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability
- Establish and implement patterns for observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for AI-powered systems, using production data to understand and continuously improve system behavior
- Set and hold the bar for engineering quality and best practices through standards, patterns, and written guidance that others naturally adopt, raising the bar for the team and the broader organization
- Mentor engineers at all levels through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance
- Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written in Kotlin and Java using DropWizard, running on AWS (DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda). We store data in sharded Postgres databases and have our own platform for user management, canary deployments, and load balancing. Our web front-end is built with React and ES6
Our take
Running a restaurant means managing a stressful set of elements, all needing to work together seamlessly to create a good experience for diners. Toast helps to streamline processes and puts an end to piles of paperwork by providing a platform whereby tableside ordering, menu modifications, labour management, payroll, and more are all housed in one system that can run from a tablet.
Toast offers restaurant-grade hardware and cloud-based, customisable payment solutions to serve clients from startup through to growth phase, as well as a service for established restaurants. By combining all the digital services a restaurant might need, the platform can act as a comprehensive solution for restaurants of any size, saving restaurateurs from having to invest in a range of technologies.
Toast has over 70,000 restaurants on its books, from food trucks to national brands, and its mobile ordering and payment solutions have made it a recognized brand for consumers. The company's IPO in 2021 saw it valued at over $30 billion, and since then, it has added more features to its product suite, including wholesale and catering order tools. Toast has proven its place as an indispensable player in the restaurant space.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
28% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Feb 2020
$400m
SERIES F
Apr 2019
$250m
SERIES E
Total funding: $899m
Company benefits
- Peer and company recognition programs
- Unlimited Vacation
- Sabbatical opportunity after five years
- Professional Development Reimbursement Program
- Commitment to Employee Wellness through resources such as a quarterly Wellness Stipend
- Various peer and company recognition programs
- 401(k) and matching
- Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage
- Mental Health Benefits
- Subsidized backup childcare
Company HQ
Fort Point Channel Landmark District, Boston, MA
Leadership
Steve Fredette
(Co-Founder & President)They studied at MIT before co-founding Klick Mobile in 2009 and spending almost 7 years at Endeca. They left their Management role in June 2012 having co-founded Toast in May.
Aman Narang
(Co-Founder & CEO)Having studied Computer Science at MIT, they worked at Endeca for 5 years. They moved from working as Product Manager to work full-time as President of Toast in 2013, having co-founded it the previous year.
Jonathan Grimm
(Co-Founder & CTO)They also studied Computer Science at MIT before working as an Engineer for Endeca for over 4 years. They worked at Oracle for 5 months prior to co-founding Toast in May 2012.
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