Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead

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.

At Toast, we are committed to empowering our customers by providing the technology, resources, and community they need to thrive. While our roots are in food service, we are rapidly expanding into adjacent markets and international territories. Our mission is to build a world-class publishing and configuration platform that supports the diverse needs of all Toast customers, regardless of their industry or location.

As a member of the Configuration Platform team, you will be at the heart of Toast’s most critical infrastructure. We are the high-concurrency engine powering live system updates across the entire Toast ecosystem. Whether it’s a menu change in Ireland or a pricing update for a 100 location enterprise, it all flows through our systems. We empower our customers with the ability to transform their operations in real-time with consistency and reliability

Why this team?

Scale and Resiliency: We are the highest-trafficked service at Toast. Our platform is mission-critical to core operations like ordering and business management; if we aren't performing, the business stops.

Expanding the Vision: We are advancing a sophisticated change management vision. We give customers the confidence and precision tools they need to manage complex configurations and run their global businesses with ease.

Platform Enablement: Beyond serving end-users, we are an ever-evolving internal platform. We aim to empower other Toast engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale their own features quickly on top of our robust architecture.

Future-Proofing: As our customer base grows at a phenomenal rate, we are re-architecting our infrastructure to handle increasing technical complexity and global scale.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

Serve as the technical lead for the Config Platform team, owning the technical vision, architecture, and quality of the systems we build and operate

Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable systems that are critical to our customers’ success, staying hands-on in the code and the details

Lead the modernization of our architecture for scale and drive the technical vision for enterprise-grade change management, so customers can confidently audit and manage changes across thousands of locations

Define and drive long-term technical architecture and strategy across the entire organization, aligning executive business goals with platform capabilities

Partner with Engineering Management, Product, and Design to shape the roadmap, turn ambiguous problems into well-scoped, sequenced plans, and drive execution through to delivery

Design solutions that anticipate and accommodate future needs while considering tradeoffs

Lead technical design reviews and set a high bar for code quality, testing, and operational excellence across the team

Effectively communicate technical direction and build alignment with the Toast engineering teams that build on top of our platform

Own the operational health of the highest-trafficked service at Toast: diagnose performance bottlenecks, implement optimizations, and lead incident response and follow-through

Mentor and grow the engineers on your team, and sponsor senior engineering talent (Staff and Senior Staff engineers) to grow the next generation of technical leaders across Toast

Act as a force multiplier in improving engineering productivity, including pioneering how the team uses AI tools to build faster and with higher quality