Staff Software Engineer

Toast is a technology company that helps restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Catering & Events team to build and evolve a product that manages complex catering and event workflows. The role involves leading design initiatives, evolving system architecture, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives that span multiple teams and systems, from concept through production, balancing short-term delivery with long-term system health
• Own and evolve the architecture of critical systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability
• Drive technical strategy within your domain, identifying opportunities to simplify systems, reduce complexity, and improve engineering velocity
• Partner with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to shape ambiguous problem spaces into clear, actionable solutions with measurable customer impact
• Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising the bar for engineering excellence through guidance, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration
• Establish and promote best practices for code quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence across services
• Proactively identify and address system-wide risks, performance bottlenecks, and scaling challenges
• Champion the adoption of AI and emerging technologies to unlock new capabilities, improve developer productivity, and drive innovation across the organization

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed systems in production environments
• Strong backend expertise (Java or Kotlin preferred) with the ability to influence and contribute across the full stack when needed
• Demonstrated ability to design scalable architectures and make high-quality technical tradeoffs across multiple systems and teams
• Experience navigating ambiguity and driving alignment across stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions
• Track record of technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standards and practices
• Deep understanding of microservices architectures, system design, and operational considerations (performance, reliability, observability)
• Ability to decompose complex problems into clear strategies and guide teams through execution
• Strong product and customer mindset, with a history of delivering solutions that create meaningful user and business impact
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries
• Experience leveraging AI-based tools or platforms to meaningfully increase engineering effectiveness and/or enable new product capabilities