Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), or New York (hybrid)

Who We Are

Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Voice AI Team.

On the Voice AI Team, our mission is to build and operate the voice platform that powers Toast and to ship novel applications on top of it that create real value across Toast's customer base. This is a greenfield space where the platform and its use cases are being defined together, and the work you do here will be foundational to how Toast uses voice AI for years to come.

As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll take ownership of significant projects end-to-end: designing systems, driving execution across the team, and making the technical decisions that shape how the platform grows. You'll work closely with product, engineering, and stakeholders across Toast to turn ambiguous problems into reliable, scalable systems.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable backend services, applications, and core platform components supporting Toast's Voice AI platform used across teams
Conceive and lead complex, cross-cutting projects from design through production, owning outcomes and driving alignment across stakeholders and across a broad range of stakeholders
Shape the technical direction on your team and beyond by making architectural decisions, defining patterns, and reducing complexity for the engineers and teams that depend on your work
Build and evolve integrations with AI platforms and internal Toast systems, making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability
Establish and implement patterns for observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for AI-powered systems, using production data to understand and continuously improve system behavior
Set and hold the bar for engineering quality and best practices through standards, patterns, and written guidance that others naturally adopt, raising the bar for the team and the broader organization
Mentor engineers at all levels through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

8+ years of experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or Kotlin
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
Experience developing AI-integrated products or features, with a practical understanding of how to ship and iterate on systems that incorporate LLMs or other AI capabilities
Experience building and reasoning about AI-powered systems, including nondeterminism, evaluation strategies, observability, and cost management
Experience shipping complex, mission-critical production services and owning them long-term
Track record of leading multi-person and multi-team projects end-to-end, from design through rollout
Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and production reliability
Basic familiarity with frontend development
Strong cross-team communication and collaboration skills; able to influence direction without formal authority both within your team and across the broader organization
Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) in day-to-day development and have caused others to become more proficient with AI coding tools
Experience with voice or conversational AI platforms is a plus, but not required

Our Tech Stack

Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written in Kotlin and Java using DropWizard, running on AWS (DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda). We store data in sharded Postgres databases and have our own platform for user management, canary deployments, and load balancing. Our web front-end is built with React and ES6.

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 Produ

Staff Software Engineer, Voice AI Platform at Toast