Principal Software Engineer, AI Pod

Company: Toast

About Toast:
Toast builds technology to empower restaurants and local businesses in the digital world, helping owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy. Our purpose-built technology, increasingly shaped by AI, ensures restaurants can trust us for today's needs while investing in future experiences.

About the AI Pod:
An AI pod at Toast is a focused team of specialists tackling complex, high-impact problems across Toast's product and platform landscape using AI-first approaches.

The Role:
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will work full-stack across ambitious, cross-cutting initiatives. You will bring deep technical expertise and architectural judgment to solve some of the hardest problems at Toast.

A Day in the Life (Responsibilities):

• Lead full-stack design and delivery of AI-native solutions for complex, cross-functional problems.
• Drive technical architecture for pod initiatives, including backend services, APIs, frontend, and developer-facing interfaces.
• Build and integrate LLM-powered agents, tools, and workflows into product and platform contexts.
• Set and uphold engineering standards: code quality, system design, testing, and operational practices.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing.
• Partner with stakeholders across Toast engineering to define scope, align on approach, and deliver outcomes.
• Serve as a technical voice in cross-team architecture discussions.

What You'll Need to Thrive (Requirements):

• 10+ years of experience designing and delivering scalable software systems, with a strong full-stack background.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical architecture for a platform, product, or engineering team.
• Experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI platform infrastructure.
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and experience extending them with custom plugins.
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks.
• Strong prompt engineering skills.
• Solid foundation in modern backend (Java, Kotlin, or similar) and frontend (TypeScript, React, or similar) technologies.
• Bias towards action and comfort operating in ambiguous, rapidly evolving problem spaces.

What Will Help You Stand Out:

• Familiarity with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocols and multi-agent orchestration patterns.
• Experience with machine learning concepts, model evaluation, or ML infrastructure.
• Experience building developer experience platforms or internal tooling.
• Familiarity with observability tooling for AI/LLM systems (e.g., Langfuse, DataDog).

AI at Toast:
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 and are inspired by the value Toasters are already driving with them.

Total Rewards Philosophy:
We offer competitive compensation and benefits programs designed to attract, retain, and motivate top talent. Learn more at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

Work Location:
#LI-Hybrid
#BI-Hybrid

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
At Toast, we embrace diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. We create equitable opportunities for all and strive to deliver exceptional experiences. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

Accessibility:
If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

Additional Information:
For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment.