About the position
Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Sous Chef team and lead the next phase of innovation in how Toast helps its customers operate more efficiently and intelligently. On the Sous Chef team, our mission is to build an AI-powered assistant that transforms how restaurants make decisions, streamline operations, and engage with their data. By delivering actionable insights and intelligent recommendations, Sous Chef enables restaurateurs to focus more on hospitality and less on manual overhead. A successful Sous Chef experience means our customers spend fewer hours on operations, improve margins, grow revenue, and elevate the guest and employee experience—both within and beyond the Toast ecosystem. This role is deeply cross-functional and high-impact, with ownership over end-to-end architecture, experience, data integrations, and AI service infrastructure. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive platform-wide improvements that scale across multiple teams and product areas.
Responsibilities
- Drive the technical strategy and architecture for AI-powered experiences across the Toast platform, with a focus on scalability, performance, and usability.
- Lead cross-team initiatives and complex projects from conception to production, ensuring alignment across engineering, product, and design.
- Architect and build robust, scalable services and data pipelines that power the Sous Chef experience, integrating deeply with other core Toast products.
- Mentor and coach engineers across multiple teams, fostering technical growth, quality, and a culture of continuous improvement.
- Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies, particularly around LLMs and machine learning systems, to enhance product capabilities.
- Champion engineering excellence and best practices through design reviews, code reviews, and technical leadership.
- Partner closely with stakeholders to translate business goals into scalable technical solutions that create measurable customer impact.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional experience designing and building scalable backend systems using Java, Kotlin, or other object-oriented languages.
- Proven experience leading cross-functional initiatives and mentoring engineers across levels and teams.
- Deep expertise in modern service architectures (e.g. microservices, event-driven systems) and distributed systems at scale.
- Extensive with modern APIs and data modeling practices (REST, GraphQL, etc.), and experience with non-relational data stores such as DynamoDB.
- Hands-on experience integrating or building systems with machine learning or large language models.
- Experience delivering AI/ML-powered user experiences in production environments.
- Strong cross-team communication and the ability to influence technical roadmaps across multiple stakeholders.
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and setting direction in fast-moving or greenfield areas.
- Passion for building intelligent products that make real-world businesses more successful.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits programs.
- Flexibility to meet changing needs.
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
- Hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration.
