Staff Software Engineer, Voice AI Platform

Toast is building a restaurant platform and is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join its Voice AI Team. The role focuses on designing, building, and operating resilient backend services and platform components for Voice AI, while leading complex projects, shaping technical direction, and improving AI system reliability and evaluation.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable backend services, applications, and core platform components supporting Toast's Voice AI platform used across teams
• Conceive and lead complex, cross-cutting projects from design through production, owning outcomes and driving alignment across stakeholders and across a broad range of stakeholders
• Shape the technical direction on your team and beyond by making architectural decisions, defining patterns, and reducing complexity for the engineers and teams that depend on your work
• Build and evolve integrations with AI platforms and internal Toast systems, making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability
• Establish and implement patterns for observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for AI-powered systems, using production data to understand and continuously improve system behavior
• Set and hold the bar for engineering quality and best practices through standards, patterns, and written guidance that others naturally adopt, raising the bar for the team and the broader organization
• Mentor engineers at all levels through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or Kotlin
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
• Experience developing AI-integrated products or features, with a practical understanding of how to ship and iterate on systems that incorporate LLMs or other AI capabilities
• Experience building and reasoning about AI-powered systems, including nondeterminism, evaluation strategies, observability, and cost management
• Experience shipping complex, mission-critical production services and owning them long-term
• Track record of leading multi-person and multi-team projects end-to-end, from design through rollout
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and production reliability
• Basic familiarity with frontend development
• Strong cross-team communication and collaboration skills; able to influence direction without formal authority both within your team and across the broader organization
• Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) in day-to-day development and have caused others to become more proficient with AI coding tools
• Experience with voice or conversational AI platforms is a plus, but not required