Software Engineer II, 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 sits and builds the tools, platforms, and workflows that hundreds of Toast engineers rely on every day.
• We maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development, increasingly leveraging AI to enhance these workflows.
• You'll build and improve the tooling they use every day, measure where time is lost, and ship changes that empower Developers across Toast to ship faster and with more confidence.
• More and more of this work involves AI-assisted development, so you'll help shape how Toast engineers build software in the years ahead.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

• Maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development.
• Contribute to key internal development platform components like service templates and the developer portal.
• Find and fix bottlenecks in the developer workflow, such as slow local builds, flaky tests, and painful setup steps, and use data to measure the impact of your changes.
• Maintain and expand testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services.
• Help integrate and roll out AI-assisted development tools, and help engineers across Toast adopt them effectively.
• Partner directly with product engineering teams to understand their pain points, gather feedback, and turn it into improvements to the platform.
• Operate the services you own in production, including monitoring, on-call participation, and incident follow-up.
• Write clear documentation and take part in design and code reviews with teammates.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production software.
• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript).
• Experience building and maintaining core libraries and developer tooling.
• Working knowledge of containers and cloud infrastructure (e.g. Docker, AWS).
• Solid grounding in testing practices and in writing maintainable, well-tested code.
• Comfort jumping into unfamiliar codebases and debugging problems across the stack.
• Strong empathy for your users (fellow engineers) and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly.

What will help you stand out:

• Experience with the Backstage Developer Portal.
• Familiarity with AI-augmented development workflows and tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar).
• Experience managing 3rd party tools like LaunchDarkly, Wiremock Cloud, or Postman
• Contributions to internal or open-source developer tools, CLIs, or IDE plugins.
• Experience instrumenting developer metrics (e.g. DORA, build/test analytics) or observability tools like Datadog.

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

$133,000 — $213,000 USD

Zone B

$115,000 — $184,000 USD

Zone C

$104,000 — $166,000 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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