Principal Product Manager, Voice AI

About Toast

Toast creates technology that empowers restaurants and local businesses to thrive in an increasingly digital world. Our platform helps business owners operate more efficiently, increase sales, engage customers, and foster employee satisfaction. We are now launching a new initiative to bring the transformative power of voice AI directly into the in-store restaurant experience. While voice technology has already revolutionized drive-thru and phone ordering, we believe there is a significant opportunity to enhance in-store interactions for guests and improve proficiency for restaurant teams. This dedicated team will explore voice capabilities across both front-of-house (guest ordering, service interactions, POS assistance) and back-of-house (kitchen coordination, hands-free workflows, inventory signals).

About the Role

As the Principal Product Manager — Voice AI (In-Store) on the Commerce Platform, you will be instrumental in defining the strategy for this exciting new domain. Your responsibilities will include evaluating vendors and partners, leading zero-to-one discovery and pilot programs in real restaurant environments, and driving the commercialization of a reusable voice platform. This platform will be designed to power multiple use cases across the restaurant ecosystem.

A Day in the Life (Responsibilities)

• Define Vision & Portfolio Strategy: Own the long-term vision and multi-quarter roadmap for in-store voice AI and the underlying platform, balancing short-term pilots with long-term platform investments.
• Run Vendor & Technical Evaluation: Lead the technical evaluation of voice and AI vendors (ASR, NLU, TTS, edge inference, on-device options), creating robust benchmarking frameworks for accuracy, latency, privacy, and cost.
• Lead Commercial Conversations: Drive vendor commercial discussions (pricing models, licensing, SLAs) and identify key negotiation points, partnering with Procurement and Legal for contract finalization and budget approvals.
• Drive Zero → One Discovery and Pilots: Plan and execute comprehensive discovery, rapid prototyping, and in-restaurant pilots, iterating based on operational feedback and scaling successful experiments.
• Design a Reusable Voice Platform: Define APIs, integration patterns, data flows, and tooling to ensure voice capabilities are reusable across guest experiences, staff workflows, and integrations with POS, kitchen systems, and telemetry services.
• Lead GTM & Commercialization: Define pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy in collaboration with Product Marketing, Sales, and Operations, identifying commercial models suitable for restaurants of varying sizes.
• Coordinate Cross-Functional Delivery: Align Engineering, Hardware Operations, Reliability, Security, Data, Research, Design, Care/Onboarding, and Go-To-Market partners to de-risk delivery and adoption.
• Drive Operational Readiness & Reliability: Define operational playbooks, observability, edge/online failover modes, and post-launch monitoring to ensure reliable in-store behavior and minimize support costs.
• Champion Field Research & Validation: Spend time in restaurants to understand operational workflows, validate prototypes, and iterate with real staff and guests.
• Mentor & Shape Product Practice: Coach senior Product Managers and engineers on voice/AI product development, vendor evaluation, and responsible AI practices, contributing to the overall Product Playbook.
• Embrace AI Tools: Actively embrace and advocate for the use of AI tools to accelerate product discovery, streamline execution, and explore new product experiences, helping to shape both how and what we build.

What You'll Need to Thrive (Requirements)

• AI Product Delivery Experience: Approximately 8+ years of experience shipping complex software products, with demonstrated ownership of multi-team programs or a major product portfolio, and experience delivering AI-enabled features or products.
• AI Model Evaluation: Hands-on experience defining and owning AI model evaluation (e.g., WER/CER, intent accuracy, wake-word false accept/reject, latency, completion/task success), building continuous evaluation and model operations processes (drift detection, automated regression tests, A/B testing, rollback/mitigation playbooks), and partnering with ML teams to run experiments and error analysis.
• Zero → One Experience: Proven track record of taking a product from discovery through prototype and pilot to successful scale.
• Vendor Evaluation & Commercial Acumen: Hands-on experience evaluating AI/voice vendors and actively participating in vendor commercial discussions (with Procurement/Legal finalizing contracts).
• Platform Mindset: Ability to design reusable APIs and platform capabilities that enable multiple downstream use cases and teams.
• Customer & Operations Empathy: Experience conducting on-site discovery and validating prototypes in operational environments (e.g., restaurants or other physical venues).
• Cross-Team Leadership: Exemplary stakeholder management skills and the ability to align senior partners across hardware, engineering, operations, and GTM, particularly on high-visibility initiatives.
• Communication & Influence: Clear, persuasive written and verbal communication skills, capable of synthesizing technical tradeoffs and business value for executives and partners.

Special Sauce* (Nice to Haves)

• Speech / Voice Product Experience: Prior experience building voice AI products (ASR/NLU/TTS, or direct work with speech teams) is helpful but not required.
• Conversational UX & Dialog Design: Experience designing conversational flows, state management, turn-taking, error recovery, and graceful degradation.
• Exposure to Hardware Considerations for Voice: Familiarity with far-field audio, beamforming, noise cancellation, and embedded audio processing.
• Experience with On-Device / Edge Inference: Knowledge of hybrid cloud/edge voice architectures, model quantization, and latency/footprint tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with Privacy, Compliance, and PII Handling: Understanding of voice data considerations, including on-device vs. cloud processing and country-level regulations.
• Background in Restaurant, Retail, or Other Physical-World Operations.
• Experience with ML lifecycle tooling, continuous model evaluation, and production A/B testing strategies for AI features.

You’ll be Measured On (Suggested Success Metrics)

• Launch and adoption of successful in-store voice pilots (pilot → scale conversion).
• Measurable operational impact (e.g., staff time saved, reduction in order errors, throughput gains).
• Guest experience improvements (NPS/CSAT lift for voice flows, voice take rate).
• Platform reuse (number of distinct use cases / teams reusing core voice APIs).
• Reliability & support outcomes (uptime targets, reduction in Care tickets related to voice).
• AI health & model performance: model accuracy (WER/intent accuracy), latency, drift rate, and rate of regressions caught by CI/monitoring systems.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our core company values is a hunger to build and learn. We firmly believe that embracing 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 consistently inspired by how our "Toasters" are already driving real value with them. The individuals who thrive here are those who embrace changes that enable us to build more for our customers; it’s a fundamental part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We are committed to providing competitive compensation and benefits programs designed to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest talent in our industry. Our total rewards package extends beyond earning potential, offering the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet the evolving needs of our Toasters. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

Pay Range

The base salary range for this role is $165,000 - $264,000 USD. The starting salary will be determined based on skills and experience. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions, if eligible), benefits, and equity (if eligible).

How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our primary goal is to get to know you. We utilize AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks such as note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews, ensuring they can remain fully focused on your conversation. It is important to note that all final hiring decisions are made by people.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.

We Thrive Together

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, please visit: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast.

Apply Today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

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. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.