Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer, Catering & Events

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.

About this role

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.

Requirements

• 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.

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.

The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

• Zone A: $193,000—$309,000 USD
• Zone B: $168,000—$269,000 USD
• Zone C: $151,000—$242,000 USD

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. 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.

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. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast.

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.

For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Key skills/competency

• Staff Software Engineer
• Distributed Systems
• Backend Development
• Java
• Kotlin
• System Design
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Technical Leadership
• Mentorship