Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

At Toast, we are committed to empowering our customers by providing the technology, resources, and community they need to thrive. While our roots are in food service, we are rapidly expanding into adjacent markets and international territories. Our mission is to build a world-class publishing and configuration platform that supports the diverse needs of all Toast customers, regardless of their industry or location.

As a member of the Configuration Platform team, you will be at the heart of Toast’s most critical infrastructure. We are the high-concurrency engine powering live system updates across the entire Toast ecosystem. Whether it’s a menu change in Ireland or a pricing update for a 100 location enterprise, it all flows through our systems. We empower our customers with the ability to transform their operations in real-time with consistency and reliability

Why this team?

• Scale and Resiliency: We are the highest-trafficked service at Toast. Our platform is mission-critical to core operations like ordering and business management; if we aren't performing, the business stops.

• Expanding the Vision: We are advancing a sophisticated change management vision. We give customers the confidence and precision tools they need to manage complex configurations and run their global businesses with ease.

• Platform Enablement: Beyond serving end-users, we are an ever-evolving internal platform. We aim to empower other Toast engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale their own features quickly on top of our robust architecture.

• Future-Proofing: As our customer base grows at a phenomenal rate, we are re-architecting our infrastructure to handle increasing technical complexity and global scale.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

• Serve as the technical lead for the Config Platform team, owning the technical vision, architecture, and quality of the systems we build and operate

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable systems that are critical to our customers’ success, staying hands-on in the code and the details

• Lead the modernization of our architecture for scale and drive the technical vision for enterprise-grade change management, so customers can confidently audit and manage changes across thousands of locations

• Define and drive long-term technical architecture and strategy across the entire organization, aligning executive business goals with platform capabilities

• Partner with Engineering Management, Product, and Design to shape the roadmap, turn ambiguous problems into well-scoped, sequenced plans, and drive execution through to delivery

• Design solutions that anticipate and accommodate future needs while considering tradeoffs

• Lead technical design reviews and set a high bar for code quality, testing, and operational excellence across the team

• Effectively communicate technical direction and build alignment with the Toast engineering teams that build on top of our platform

• Own the operational health of the highest-trafficked service at Toast: diagnose performance bottlenecks, implement optimizations, and lead incident response and follow-through

• Mentor and grow the engineers on your team, and sponsor senior engineering talent (Staff and Senior Staff engineers) to grow the next generation of technical leaders across Toast

• Act as a force multiplier in improving engineering productivity, including pioneering how the team uses AI tools to build faster and with higher quality

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• Approach your work with humility, empathy, and deep respect for your peers

• Articulate sophisticated project roadmaps and empower engineering cohorts to drive them toward fruition

• Proven track record of delivering and operating mission-critical production services at scale

• Maintain end-to-end ownership over high-throughput systems while navigating the complexities of distributed architecture

• Embody a growth-oriented mindset focused on continuous elevation of your craft and domain

• Establish yourself as a trusted technical authority capable of making decisions that secure both immediate wins and long-term strategic goals

Our Tech Stack

Our products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets, to backend Kotlin and Java services, to internal, guest-facing, and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Kotlin/Java and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from DynamoDB to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, canary deployments, and robust load balancing. We store data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilize Apache Spark for large scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The web front-end is built using React and ES6. Our main point of sale application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform, we rely on Pulsar event driven architecture along with some RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Spread* of Total Rewards Philosophy We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

*Bread puns encouraged but not required!

The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

Zone A

$230,000—$368,000 USD

Zone B

$200,000—$320,000 USD

Zone C

$180,000—$288,000 USD

How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid WorkingWe embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Apply today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

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