Senior Director, Care Operational Excellence

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.

A day in the life

(Responsibilities)

• Toast is looking for a Senior Director, Customer Care Operational Excellence to own how our customer support organization operates, end to end.
• This is a build-and-run role: you will design (and continuously redesign) the people, process, systems, and data that determine whether every customer, from our smallest SMB accounts to our largest Enterprise relationships, gets a fast, effortless, high-quality resolution.

This role sits at the center of our AI transformation of Support operations, evaluating, implementing, and scaling AI across chat, voice, and agent-assist workflows, while also owning the fundamentals: workforce planning and capacity, quality and performance measurement, and a closed-loop voice-of-customer program that feeds directly into our product and engineering roadmaps.

You will lead a team, and this is a hands-on role: you're expected to get into the details, run point on hard problems personally, and build things yourself when needed.

• Own the end-to-end design of how Support operates: org structure, staffing model, tiering/routing, escalation paths, and channel model (chat, email, phone, self-service, community), and continuously refine it as the business scales.
• Build and run the operating cadence for the function: performance reviews, root-cause/escalation reviews, leadership readouts, and continuous-improvement rhythms.
• Segment design so that SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise customers each get a service model appropriate to their needs, complexity, and value.
• AI & Support Technology Transformation
• Own the roadmap for AI-enabled support, including virtual agents/chatbots, voice AI, agent-assist, and automation, from business case through implementation, measured adoption, and iteration.
• Partner with Product and Engineering as a co-owner of the tools and systems Support runs on: helpdesk/CRM, contact center (CCaaS), knowledge base, and AI/automation platforms, representing Support's

requirements

and stress-testing what's shipped.

• Evaluate, select, and manage the vendor and technology stack (including AI vendors and BPO/outsourcing partners), balancing cost, quality, and customer experience.

Data, Insights & Performance Measurement

• Define the metrics that matter for Toast's support operations, including but not limited to TTR/resolution time, CSAT, customer effort (CES), quality/QA scores, cost-to-serve, and AI containment/deflection rate. Partner with Analytics to build the reporting and analytics and associated insights to drive operations across lines of business, segments, channels, and geographies.
• Build a rigorous quality assurance program (QA scoring, calibration, coaching feedback loops) to ensure consistency as the org scales and as AI takes on more of the work.
• Use data to diagnose root causes of poor experience and prioritize the highest-leverage fixes across people, process, and systems.
• Voice of the Customer & Product Feedback
• Own Product Feedback program in partnership with VOC and other related efforts: capturing, synthesizing, and prioritizing feedback and issues surfaced through Support.
• Build the formal, closed-loop mechanism that routes customer and product feedback to R&D/Product leadership, ensuring it gets actioned and tracked through to impact on support volume and CSAT.
• Workforce Planning & Capacity Management
• Own workforce planning, forecasting, and capacity management (staffing, scheduling, shrinkage, real-time management) across in-house and outsourced/BPO teams.
• Model the impact of AI automation on headcount and capacity plans, and adjust staffing levels as containment rates change.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Partnership

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership as a genuine design partner on tools, features, and AI capabilities that affect the customer experience or support workload.
• Represent Support in cross-functional planning (Sales, Success, Finance, Legal/Compliance, Trust & Safety) and ensure Support's operational needs and constraints are reflected in company-wide decisions.
• Communicate performance, risk, and plans to executive leadership through regular business reviews.

Team Leadership & Talent Development

• Build, lead, and develop a team of operations and operational excellence managers/leads; build the bench and succession plan for the function.
• Instill a hands-on, builder culture on the team: this function should be as comfortable running an analysis or drafting a process itself as it is directing others to do so.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 12+ years of experience in Customer Support/Service, Customer Experience, or Support Operations, including significant leadership experience at the Director level or above.
• Track record building and scaling support organizations inside large, high-growth technology companies, ideally B2B/B2B2C, that went through significant scale (multiple X revenue/customer growth) rather than steady-state maintenance.
• Direct, hands-on experience implementing AI in a support organization (virtual agent/chatbot, voice AI, agent-assist, automation), able to speak to what was built, how it was measured, and what it actually did to cost and experience.
• Experience supporting multiple customer segments (SMB through Enterprise) with differentiated service models, SLAs, and channels.
• Strong quantitative and analytical skills; fluent working with support/CX data and BI tools, and comfortable building models (capacity, cost-to-serve, ROI) independently.
• Experience with workforce management/capacity planning disciplines and tools.
• Proven cross-functional partnership with Product and Engineering, including influencing roadmaps without direct authority.
• A genuine doer, willing and able to roll up their sleeves, get into the weeds of a process or a dataset, and personally drive a problem to resolution rather than only directing others to.
• Bachelor's degree required; MBA or equivalent a plus but not required.

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 align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy .

Zone A

$212,000 — $339,000 USD

Zone B

$185,000 — $296,000 USD

Zone C

$166,000 — $266,000 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.
• 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.

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 [email protected] .

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