Principal Software Engineer

The posting, as Toast wrote it

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy. We help restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences through our platform that combines restaurant point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support. As a Toaster, you will be challenged to take on meaningful projects to help craft the company's future. Join us as we empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive.

Your mission is to lead the architectural design, technical execution, and implementation across the foundational domains of Toast’s Team Suite products, Payroll and Team Management. The Payroll product delivers daily value to its users - enabling restaurant owners to pay their staff and pay their taxes, and enabling transparency for wages and tips for restaurant employees. The Team Management suite allows restaurants to hire, manage, and schedule their staff.

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a key technical leader in the group, driving modern architectural patterns—including spec-driven development and agentic workflows—to deliver high-impact software.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Lead fellow developers, product managers, designers, and user researchers to build a strong tech infrastructure that enables amazing features
• Own the architecture for authentication, authorization, and organizational hierarchy — driving technical direction in these domains across the organization
• Help us transform a traditional SasS platform into an agentic, system-of-action
• Flex your full-stack muscles by driving challenging large end-to-end initiatives or core architecture changes in a supportive, collaborative team environment
• Define and drive technical strategy for problems that affect multiple parts of the business
• Mentor developers across multiple teams through code-pairing and detailed code, architecture, and project reviews
• Champion best practices for development, deployment and quality life cycles
• 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.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Strong technologist with extensive experience defining and implementing high scale SaaS solutions.
• Deep experience with identity and access architecture — authentication, permissions models, and multi-entity organizational hierarchy — in a multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Experience with a broad set of technologies that includes those used at Toast - tiered web applications, microservices, mobile, API design patterns, Java, Kotlin, React, data analytics.
• Strong enthusiasm for agentic development practices, LLM integration, and modern software paradigms

[…]
sks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Apply today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com .

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