Principal Software Engineer

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world. They are looking for a hands-on Principal Software Engineer to join the AI & Strategy Engineering team, responsible for building tools and implementing Machine Learning to enhance sales operations.

Responsibilities:

• Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting and coding high-performance backend services and ML pipelines
• Build and prototype new internal products from scratch that leverage LLMs and Agentic AI to automate account research, lead prioritization, and complex quoting logic
• Design and implement ML models that provide real-time recommendations to sales users, reducing manual entry and increasing deal velocity
• Develop the backend connective tissue between our custom quoting engine, Salesforce, and internal data lakes to ensure a seamless, low-latency end-to-end experience
• Act as a domain expert to solve complex synchronization and architectural challenges across the GTM stack, ensuring systems are scalable and resilient
• Drive engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, automated testing, and by modeling best practices for SE1-SE3 engineers on the team
• Deliver significant core capabilities that have broad impact; take high-level goals and turn them into sequenced, production-ready code
• Anticipate shifts in product needs and build flexible, decoupled backend systems that can evolve with our AI strategy
• Ensure the reliability of GTM tools by building deep observability into every service you ship

Requirements:

• Extensive experience in backend languages (Java, Go, Python) with a track record of building complex, distributed systems
• Practical, hands-on experience deploying Machine Learning models and building with LLMs (e.g., LangChain, RAG architectures, or Model Fine-tuning) in a production environment
• Experience building or deeply integrating with complex enterprise software, specifically custom quoting engines or CRM internals (Salesforce Apex/LWC)
• Ability to design event-driven architectures and manage data flow across disparate systems with high integrity
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field
• Experience building internal 'Sales Tech' or 'Fintech' tools that directly impact revenue
• Familiarity with AWS data services (SageMaker, Lambda, SQS)
• A passion for removing 'human-in-the-loop' friction through intelligent automation