Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Network Engineering

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world. As a Staff Software Engineer on Traffic Engineering at Toast, you will design, build, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast, enhancing how services connect and secure traffic at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, deploy, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge through cloud networking down to service-to-service traffic
• Lead complex, multi-team projects that improve how Toast services discover, route to, secure, and observe one another
• Own the reliability of critical traffic infrastructure end-to-end, from design through on-call response, post-incident learning, and long-term hardening
• Design solutions that anticipate future scale and product needs (multi-region, new protocols, evolving service-mesh patterns) while making explicit tradeoffs
• Partner with the team on cloud networking, edge routing (Cloudflare), DNS, and IaC-driven automation
• Act as a force multiplier: mentor engineers, improve developer ergonomics for service owners, and make the platform easier and safer to operate
• Lead through influence across multiple teams and reporting lines, setting technical direction and driving adoption of platform standards without direct authority
• Leverage cutting-edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building — contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team

Requirements:

• Experience shipping and operating mission-critical production services
• Led complex projects that span multiple teams and have presented technical plans to both engineering and non-engineering audiences
• Have a growth mindset with an emphasis on improving yourself, the engineers around you, and your functional area
• Deep, hands-on experience in Kotlin or another JVM language (Java, Scala)
• Built or operated a service mesh in production — Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, or similar
• Managed cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Hands-on experience with DNS and edge routing through a CDN such as Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Akamai, or Fastly
• Working knowledge of TLS — termination, mTLS, and certificate lifecycle management at scale
• Comfortable working across the networking stack and are comfortable digging into different network layers