Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI

About the job

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. You’ll build and evolve AI-powered systems, work closely with Product and Design, and partner across Toast to deliver new customer experiences. Your impact will come from the software you build, the technical direction you establish, and your ability to turn uncertainty into progress.

About this roll* (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 prototypes to test assumptions, identify what matters, and make deliberate decisions about what to evolve, rebuild, or stop.

- 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. Build evaluations around realistic customer tasks, investigate failures, and use the results to guide improvements.

- Shape the backend services, APIs, and data models that let the product evolve quickly. Anticipate scaling needs while keeping early solutions simple.

- 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.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (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.

We are hiring individuals with a wide range of experience, so if you have more or less than these exact requirements, please still apply!

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 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 . 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 Working

We 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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