Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead

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 Config 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)

Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable systems that are critical to our customers’ success

Lead complex projects that span multiple teams to improve functionality and reliability for our customers

Design solutions that anticipate and accommodate future needs while considering tradeoffs

Effectively communicate technical direction, guide our team through execution while driving team quality practices

Act as a force multiplier in improving engineering productivity

Diagnose performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations

Do you have the right ingredients* ? (Requirements)

Approach your work with humility, empathy, and deep respect for your peers

Articulate sophisticated project roadmaps and empower engineering cohorts to drive them toward fruition

Proven track record of delivering and operating mission-critical production services at scale

Maintain end-to-end ownership over high-throughput systems while navigating the complexities of distributed architecture

Embody a growth-oriented mindset focused on continuous elevation of your craft and domain

Establish yourself as a trusted technical authority capable of making decisions that secure both immediate wins and long-term strategic goals

Our Tech Stack

Our products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets, to backend Kotlin and Java services, to internal, guest-facing, and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Kotlin/Java and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from DynamoDB to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, canary deployments, and robust load balancing. We store data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilize Apache Spark for large scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The web front-end is built using React and ES6. Our main point of sale application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform, we rely on Pulsar event driven architecture along with some RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.

AI at Toast