Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Toast is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Developer Experience. The role sets technical direction and builds tools and platforms that help Toast engineers develop, test, and ship software more effectively, including AI-native developer workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Set technical direction and long-term architecture across Developer Experience's areas: local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal
• Oversee the architecture of the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services
• Stay hands-on: design, build, and ship the highest leverage and most cross-cutting parts of the platform yourself
• Collaborate with Product using data and direct engineer feedback to find the biggest sources of friction in the developer workflow, and help turn them into a prioritized, measurable roadmap
• Design self-service golden paths and paved roads that let product teams create and evolve services with minimal friction or hand-holding
• Drive technical alignment with partner teams in areas like AI, CICD and Cloud Infrastructure so the end-to-end developer journey feels like one cohesive experience
• Partner with customer-facing teams to align developer platform solutions with customer and business needs
• Raise the bar across the team through design reviews, mentorship, and code-pairing, and by growing other engineers into technical leaders

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript) and comfort working across several
• Strong experience with build systems and dependency management at scale (e.g. Gradle, Maven, npm), including managing software migrations across hundreds of services
• A track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, from defining the problem through design, delivery, and adoption
• Experience designing developer-facing products such as CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals, with a focus on usability and adoption
• Hands-on experience with, and strong opinions about, AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices
• Strong communication skills, including writing clear technical strategy and design documents and influencing without authority
• Deep empathy for engineers as customers, and a habit of measuring outcomes rather than shipping features
• Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogs (e.g. Backstage)
• Experience building or integrating LLM-powered developer tools, coding agents, or MCP servers
• Experience with containerized or cloud-based development environments (e.g. Dev Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS)
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (e.g. DORA, SPACE, build and test analytics)