Principal Software Engineer

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.

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. While the role is primarily internally-facing, it requires infrequent interactions with enterprise customers, listening to their requirements and providing expert guidance as they deploy Toast.

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

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Lead the evolution of Toast’s backend architecture, frameworks, and data models with a strong focus on delivery efficiency, system scalability, and resilience.
• Design and build the next generation of accounting and financial systems using Java, Kotlin, DynamoDB, Pulsar, GraphQL, Big Data tools, and more.
• Define and implement scalable engineering practices, delivery frameworks, and coding standards that raise the technical bar across the org.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, UX, QA, and multiple engineering teams to deliver robust, customer-facing solutions.
• Build and maintain strong partnerships across business units, aligning technology strategies with key company objectives.
• Champion data-driven decision making by developing strategies and prioritizing initiatives with high impact on user and business outcomes.
• Mentor and grow engineers across levels, promoting a culture of inclusivity, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• Guide and influence the broader technical roadmap and architecture strategy for Toast.
• Leverage cutting edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building – contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team

What you’ll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 12+ years of experience designing and delivering complex, scalable backend systems.
• Proven technical leadership on mission-critical projects, with the ability to influence across multiple teams.
• Strong experience building distributed, event-driven architectures and microservices in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or similar OOP languages.
• Deep understanding of data architecture and schema design; experience with DynamoDB is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong knowledge of modern database systems (Postgres, SQL Server, DynamoDB).
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment, delivering value continuously.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to break down complexity and drive solutions that scale.
• A passion for building impactful products with a customer-first mindset.
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills—respectful, empathetic, humble, and inclusive.
• A growth mindset with a desire to constantly learn and uplift others.
• Comfortable balancing velocity with platform stability and long-term architecture goals.
• Comfortable using AI-powered engineering tools to improve developer productivity, code quality, and technical decision-making, with the ability to critically evaluate and validate AI-generated solutions. 
• Demonstrated experience incorporating AI into the software development lifecycle to improve engineering effectiveness, and the ability to champion best practices for responsible, secure, and high-impact AI adoption across engineering teams. 

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.