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.
• We help restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences through our platform that combines restaurant point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support.
• As a Toaster, you will be challenged to take on meaningful projects to help craft the company's future.
• Join us as we empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive.
• Your mission is to lead the architectural design, technical execution, and implementation across the foundational domains of Toast's Team Suite products, Payroll and Team Management.
• The Payroll product delivers daily value to its users - enabling restaurant owners to pay their staff and pay their taxes, and enabling transparency for wages and tips for restaurant employees.
• The Team Management suite allows restaurants to hire, manage, and schedule their staff.
• As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a key technical leader in the group, driving modern architectural patterns—including spec-driven development and agentic workflows—to deliver high-impact software.

A day in the life

(Responsibilities)

• Lead fellow developers, product managers, designers, and user researchers to build a strong tech infrastructure that enables amazing features
• Own the architecture for authentication, authorization, and organizational hierarchy — driving technical direction in these domains across the organization
• Help us transform a traditional SasS platform into an agentic, system-of-action
• Flex your full-stack muscles by driving challenging large end-to-end initiatives or core architecture changes in a supportive, collaborative team environment
• Define and drive technical strategy for problems that affect multiple parts of the business
• Mentor developers across multiple teams through code-pairing and detailed code, architecture, and project reviews
• Champion best practices for development, deployment and quality life cycles
• 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)

• Strong technologist with extensive experience defining and implementing high scale SaaS solutions.
• Deep experience with identity and access architecture — authentication, permissions models, and multi-entity organizational hierarchy — in a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Experience with a broad set of technologies that includes those used at Toast - tiered web applications, microservices, mobile, API design patterns, Java, Kotlin, React, data analytics.
• Strong enthusiasm for agentic development practices, LLM integration, and modern software paradigms.
• Experience with integration design patterns across high-scale, data-rich enterprise systems.
• A proven track record of building partnerships across engineering, product, customer success, and other stakeholders.
• Experience and interest in mentoring peers
• Experience maintaining a high bar for quality, and guiding teams to hold a high bar for the technical quality of their deliverables.
• Hungry to take on challenging technical projects

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 .

#LI-REMOTE

• 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

$230,000 — $368,000 USD

Zone B

$200,000 — $320,000 USD

Zone C

$180,000 — $288,000 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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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.