[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Toast

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Catering & Events team, you’ll help build and evolve a product that enables customers to manage complex catering and event workflows with ease. You’ll work across the stack to deliver high-impact features that reach real customers quickly. This is a highly collaborative role where you’ll partner closely with product managers and designers to bring ideas to life.

You’ll thrive here if you enjoy moving fast, learning from customers, and iterating on products in a tight feedback loop.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives that span multiple teams and systems, from concept through production, balancing short-term delivery with long-term system health.
• Own and evolve the architecture of critical systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive technical strategy within your domain, identifying opportunities to simplify systems, reduce complexity, and improve engineering velocity.
• Partner with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to shape ambiguous problem spaces into clear, actionable solutions with measurable customer impact.
• Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising the bar for engineering excellence through guidance, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration.
• Establish and promote best practices for code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence across services.
• Proactively identify and address system-wide risks, performance bottlenecks, and scaling challenges.
• Champion the adoption of AI and emerging technologies to unlock new capabilities, improve developer productivity, and drive innovation across the organization.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed systems in production environments.
• Strong backend expertise (Java or Kotlin preferred) with the ability to influence and contribute across the full stack when needed.
• Demonstrated ability to design scalable architectures and make high-quality technical tradeoffs across multiple systems and teams.
• Experience navigating ambiguity and driving alignment across stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions.
• Track record of technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standards and practices.
• Deep understanding of microservices architectures, system design, and operational considerations (performance, reliability, observability).
• Ability to decompose complex problems into clear strategies and guide teams through execution.
• Strong product and customer mindset, with a history of delivering solutions that create meaningful user and business impact.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
• Experience leveraging AI-based tools or platforms to meaningfully increase engineering effectiveness and/or enable new product capabilities.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits programs.
• Flexible benefits to meet Toasters’ changing needs.
• Base salary range based on skills, experience, and geographic location.
• Cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits.

Company Description

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, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. 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.