Principal Product Manager, Kitchen Operations

<p><strong>Location: Boston Preferred&nbsp;</strong></p> <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>The Kitchen Operations team owns one of Toast's most operationally critical and strategically exciting products: the Kitchen Display System (KDS). Deployed across tens of thousands of restaurants, Toast KDS is the connective tissue between front-of-house and back-of-house, routing tickets to the right prep stations, managing order sequencing, and helping kitchens run fast and accurately under pressure. KDS has strong growth across SMB, enterprise, and international segments.</p> <p>Our vision is KDS in the vast majority of Toast kitchens within the next few years. Getting there means three things: supporting the most sophisticated enterprise kitchen workflows in the market, differentiating through kitchen data and AI-powered operational insights, and growing adoption among the restaurants that still run on paper tickets.</p> <p>This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role at the intersection of restaurant operations, hardware-software product, and applied AI. You'll shape how hundreds of thousands of kitchen workers run their stations every day — and you'll be the one building the data and agent layer that lets kitchens run smarter, not just faster.</p> <p><strong>A day in the life (Responsibilities)&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own and drive the KDS product strategy — enterprise workflow depth, data differentiation, SMB attach growth, and the agentic AI roadmap — connecting investments to Toast's kitchen adoption vision and near-term business outcomes including ARR growth, support ticket reduction, and enterprise retention.</li> <li>Define where agentic AI creates real value in the kitchen: proactive prep time adjustments based on real-time order load, automatic kitchen configuration changes tied to labor schedules or ordering channel mix, intelligent ticket routing and load balancing — and build the investment case to pursue the highest-leverage bets.</li> <li>Own KDS delivery end-to-end, working directly with large restaurant groups to translate complex, high-stakes workflow requirements into scalable product decisions that serve the whole market.</li> <li>Lead the KDS kitchen data strategy: define what kitchen efficiency insights should look like for operators at every scale, from API-first analytics for enterprise operators to actionable reporting for SMBs, and sequence the investments to unlock it.</li> <li>Shape and validate the business case for the next-generation KDS strategy — the long-horizon bets that drive future growth.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What you'll need to thrive (Requirem