Toast builds integrated software and hardware for the food and beverage industry. Its platform brings together point-of-sale technology, payment processing, online ordering, payroll, and operational tools to help restaurants manage day-to-day work in one system. Toast serves a broad range of businesses, including quick-service and full-service restaurants, fast-casual venues, fine-dining establishments, cafés, and food trucks, while also publishing industry insights and educational resources for restaurant operators.
Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience
Set architecture and build AI-enabled developer tools for Toast’s restaurant technology platform. Improve engineering workflows across hundreds of services and teams.
Description
- Set technical direction and long-term architecture for local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal.
- Guide the architecture of testing frameworks and core libraries for web service development.
- Design, build, and deliver high-impact platform components used across teams.
- Use data and engineer feedback with Product to identify workflow friction and define a prioritized, measurable roadmap.
- Create self-service golden paths that help product teams build and evolve services.
- Align technical plans with AI, CI/CD, and Cloud Infrastructure partner teams.
- Work with customer-facing teams to ensure developer platform solutions meet customer and business needs.
- Strengthen the team’s technical practice through design reviews, mentorship, code pairing, and developing technical leaders.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience.
- Deep expertise in a general-purpose language such as Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript.
- Comfort working in multiple programming languages.
- Strong experience with large-scale build systems and dependency management, such as Gradle, Maven, or npm.
- Experience managing software migrations across hundreds of services.
- A record of leading cross-team technical initiatives from defining the problem through design, delivery, and adoption.
- Experience designing developer-facing products such as CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals.
- A focus on usability and adoption.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices, with informed perspectives on their use.
- Strong communication skills, including writing clear technical strategies and design documents and influencing without formal authority.
- Empathy for engineers as customers and a practice of measuring outcomes rather than feature delivery.
- Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogs such as Backstage is preferred.
- Experience building or integrating LLM-powered developer tools, coding agents, or MCP servers is preferred.
- Experience with containerized or cloud-based development environments such as Dev Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, or AWS ECS is preferred.
- Experience defining and tracking developer productivity measures such as DORA, SPACE, or build and test analytics is preferred.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits programs.
- Cash compensation, which may include overtime and bonus or commission when eligible.
- Equity.
- Benefits that support a healthy lifestyle.
- Flexible benefits designed to meet changing needs.
- A hybrid work model that takes individual needs into account.
- Reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.