Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI

Toast is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our New Ventures team and help build a new AI-powered product.

You'll tackle problems without an established playbook, make decisions that shape the product, and take ideas from early experiments to capabilities customers can depend on.

This is a role for someone who enjoys both exploring what's possible and making it work in practice.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and delivery of core capabilities for a new AI-powered product, from exploring an approach to launching it and improving it with customer feedback.
• Turn ambiguous product problems into working software.
• Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, deciding where to use model reasoning, tools, or conventional software to achieve reliable outcomes.
• Define what good performance means for AI-powered capabilities.
• Shape the backend services, APIs, and data models that let the product evolve quickly.
• Partner with teams across Toast to deliver integrations, resolve technical dependencies, and establish clear ownership of shared capabilities.
• Work closely with Product and Design to make tradeoffs across customer experience, technical feasibility, reliability, latency, and cost.
• Stay close to the code and production behavior: implement critical components, debug difficult problems, and own successful rollouts.
• Raise the team's effectiveness through technical feedback, mentoring, and thoughtful use of AI coding assistants and agents across development, testing, and debugging.

Requirements

• 8–12 years of experience building backend services, APIs, and production software.
• Extensive experience with an object-oriented language such as Java or Kotlin, with a deep understanding of testing, software design, and engineering best practices.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems and cloud-native services on AWS.
• Hands-on experience shipping and operating LLM-powered applications, including agents that use tools or APIs to complete multi-step tasks.
• Experience designing and implementing evaluations for AI systems, investigating failures, and using results to improve system behavior.
• Demonstrated proficiency using AI coding assistants and coding agents throughout the software development lifecycle, with clear practices for reviewing, testing, and validating their output.
• Experience balancing delivery speed with platform stability, security, and reliability, particularly when requirements are evolving.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams, with excellent communication skills on complex technical topics.
• Strong customer focus, a collaborative approach, and a track record of taking ownership in ambiguous environments.

Bonus Ingredients (Nice to Have)

• Experience building early-stage products and scaling them as customer adoption and usage grow.
• Experience designing and building GraphQL APIs.
• Comfort working across the stack.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn.

Our 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.

How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you.

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs.