Toast

As a Principal Software Engineer on our team, you will:

• Design and deliver the next generation of Toast products using our technology stack, which includes Kotlin, DynamoDB, React, Pulsar, Apache Camel, GraphQL, and Big Data technologies.
• Collaborate with our Data Platform teams to develop best-in-class reporting and analytics products.
• Document solution designs, write and review code, test, and roll out solutions to production. Capture and act on customer feedback to iteratively enhance the customer experience.
• Work closely with peers to optimize solution design for performance, flexibility, and scalability — enabling multiple product and engineering teams to work on a shared framework and platform.
• Partner with UX, Product Management, QA, and other engineering teams to build robust, high-quality solutions in a fast-moving, complex environment.
• Coach and mentor engineers on best practices and modern software development standards.

Do you have the right ingredients? (Requirements)

• 12+ years of software development experience.
• Proven experience in delivering high-quality, reliable, and scalable services to production in a continuous delivery environment.
• Expertise in AI, Cloud technologies, Image Processing, and Full Stack Development.
• Strong database skills, proficient in SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or DynamoDB.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Proficient in one or more object-oriented programming languages like Java, Kotlin, or C#.
• Hands-on experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead the development and scaling of mission-critical platform components.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate complex and ambiguous challenges and clearly communicate solutions.
• Skilled in balancing delivery speed with platform stability.
• Passionate about writing clean, maintainable, and impactful code.
• Experience in mentoring and coaching other engineers.

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.

As a Principal Engineer / Architect you will be responsible for creating a technical strategy and coordinating the designs for meeting the needs of Toast’s largest restaurant brands. You will partner with Product Managers to develop the technology roadmap that enables enterprise customers to leverage the power of Toast. You will also work closely with technical leaders and implementation teams across the organization to deliver robust, scalable solutions with integrations to customers’ external systems.

As the engineering leader on the Pricing & Funds Management team, you will be responsible for evolving our Funds Management platform (processing >$150B in annual GPV) to meet Toast’s growing needs across the world by both delivering best-in-class customer facing Fintech products and foundational capabilities that enable partner teams to accelerate their products time-to-market & scale.

If you’re a technical leader or a solutions architect, experienced with enterprise SaaS, passionate about customer value, and a great collaborator, read on! 

About this roll*:

• Design mission critical platform components at scale to ensure Toast’s Funds Management platform accurately distributes funds to beneficial party in a timely manner
• Develop an expert understanding of Toast’s payments processing platform & adjacent products to enable funds flows across Toast’s financial product suite in a seamless manner
• Document solution design, write & review code, test and rollout solutions to production, capturing & actioning customer feedback to iteratively enhance customer experience
• Collaborate with peers to optimise for solution design performance, flexibility and scalable, including enablement of multi-product & engineering teams on a common framework & platform
• Partner with UX, Product Management, QA and adjacent engineering teams to build best-in-class solutions in a complex and fast-moving environment
• Champion best practices such as quality integration and unit testing

Do you have the right ingredients*?

• Strong technologist with 12+ years experience defining and implementing high scale SaaS solutions. Experience with a broad set of technologies that includes those used at Toast - tiered web applications, microservices, API design patterns, Java, Kotlin and data analytics
• Experience with integration design patterns across high-scale Fintech platforms
• Strong interpersonal skills and a proven track record of building partnerships across engineering, product, customer success, and other stakeholders.
• Experience shipping iterative value using agile or lean software delivery methods. 
• Experience of tackling complex and ambiguous problems, communicate clearly with others to solve the problem, and share knowledge to help the whole team succeed 
• Experience building payments & Fintech products, with at least 10+ years in the payments industry

Our Tech Stack

Toast’s products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets to backend services in Java to internal, guest-facing and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Java 8 and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from S3 to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, service elevations and robust load balancing. Toast stores data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilizes Apache Spark for large scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The front-end is built primarily using React and ES6. The main Toast POS application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform we operate RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.

We Thrive Together

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 restaurant community.

Now, more than ever, the Toast team is committed to our customers. We’re taking steps to help restaurants navigate these unprecedented times with technology, resources, and community. Our focus is on building a restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. And because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants by restaurant people, restaurants can trust that we’ll deliver on their needs for today while investing in experiences that will power their restaurant of the future.

At Toast, our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all customer-facing services and other Toast production systems running smoothly. SREs are a blend of pragmatic operators and software craftspeople who apply sound software engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our environments and our codebase. Our decisions are based on instrumentation and continuous observability, as well as predictions and capacity planning.

About this roll* (Responsibilities) 

• Gather and analyze metrics from both operating systems and applications to assist in performance tuning and fault finding
• Partner with development teams to improve services through rigorous testing and release procedures
• Participate in system design consulting, platform management, and capacity planning
• Create sustainable systems and services through automation and uplift
• Balance feature development speed and reliability with well-defined service level objectives

Troubleshooting and Supporting Escalations:

• Gather and analyze metrics from both operating systems and applications to assist in performance tuning and fault finding
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations across infrastructure, databases, web, and mobile applications
• Implement strategies to increase system reliability and performance through on-call rotation and process optimization
• Perform and run blameless RCAs on incidents and outages aggressively, looking for answers that will prevent the incident from ever happening again

Do you have the right ingredients? (Requirements)

• Extensive industry experience with at least 7+ years in SRE and/or DevOps roles
• Polyglot technologist/generalist with a thirst for learning
• Deep understanding of cloud and microservice architecture and the JVM
• Experience with tools such as APM, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub, Jenkins, and Docker
• Experience developing software or software projects in at least four languages, ideally including two of Go, Python, and Java
• Experience with cloud computing technologies ( AWS cloud provider preferred)

Bread puns are encouraged but not required