About the role
<p>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.</p> <p>Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future.</p> <p>An AI pod is Toast's AI-native engineering team, a focused pod of specialists who tackle complex, high-impact problems across Toast's product and platform landscape using AI-first approaches.</p> <p>As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll work full-stack across ambitious, cross-cutting initiatives, bringing deep technical expertise and architectural judgment to some of the hardest problems at Toast.</p> <h3><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>A day in the life (Responsibilities)</strong></span></h3> <ul> <li>Lead full-stack design and delivery of AI-native solutions that address complex, cross-functional problems across Toast</li> <li>Drive technical architecture for pod initiatives, from backend services and APIs to frontend and developer-facing interfaces</li> <li>Build and integrate LLM-powered agents, tools, and workflows that bring AI capabilities directly into product and platform contexts</li> <li>Set and uphold engineering standards within the pod: code quality, system design, testing, and operational practices</li> <li>Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing</li> <li>Partner with stakeholders across Toast engineering to define problem scope, align on approach, and deliver outcomes</li> <li>Serve as a technical voice in cross-team architecture discussions, connecting pod work to broader Toast engineering patterns</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)</strong></span></h3> <ul> <li>10+ years of experience designing and delivering scalable software systems, with a strong full-stack background spanning backend services and frontend or developer-facing interfaces</li> <li>Demonstrated experience leading technical architecture for a platform, product, or engineering team</li> <li>Experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI platform infrastructure</li> <li>Familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and experience extending them through custom plugins, skills, or hooks</li> <li>Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks</li&g