Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

• Bready* to make a change?
• 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.

Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future.

• Developer Experience builds the tools and platforms Toast engineers use to write, build, and understand their code.
• We own local development environments and the inner loop, build tooling and shared libraries, and the internal developer portal and self-service golden paths.
• We also empower developers across the company by building and maintaining the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services.
• We contribute to the AI developer workflows that are changing how software gets built at Toast.
• Our goal is to make every engineer at Toast faster, more independent, and more confident in what they ship.
• We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Toast engineers build software.
• You'll pick the highest-leverage problems in the developer workflow, design solutions that work across hundreds of services and many teams, and stay hands-on while you build them.
• AI is quickly changing what developer tooling can do, and you'll help define what an AI-native developer experience looks like at Toast.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

• Set technical direction and long-term architecture across Developer Experience's areas: local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal.
• Oversee the architecture of the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services.
• Stay hands-on: design, build, and ship the highest leverage and most cross-cutting parts of the platform yourself.
• Collaborate with Product using data and direct engineer feedback to find the biggest sources of friction in the developer workflow, and help turn them into a prioritized, measurable roadmap.
• Design self-service golden paths and paved roads that let product teams create and evolve services with minimal friction or hand-holding.
• Drive technical alignment with partner teams in areas like AI, CICD and Cloud Infrastructure so the end-to-end developer journey feels like one cohesive experience.
• Partner with customer-facing teams to align developer platform solutions with customer and business needs.
• Raise the bar across the team through design reviews, mentorship, and code-pairing, and by growing other engineers into technical leaders.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript) and comfort working across several.
• Strong experience with build systems and dependency management at scale (e.g. Gradle, Maven, npm), including managing software migrations across hundreds of services.
• A track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, from defining the problem through design, delivery, and adoption.
• Experience designing developer-facing products such as CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals, with a focus on usability and adoption.
• Hands-on experience with, and strong opinions about, AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices.
• Strong communication skills, including writing clear technical strategy and design documents and influencing without authority.
• Deep empathy for engineers as customers, and a habit of measuring outcomes rather than shipping features.

What will help you stand out:

• Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogs (e.g. Backstage).
• Experience building or integrating LLM-powered developer tools, coding agents, or MCP servers.
• Experience with containerized or cloud-based development environments (e.g. Dev Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS).
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (e.g. DORA, SPACE, build and test analytics).

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

$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.
• 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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