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.