Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), New York (hybrid), San Francisco (hybrid)

Bready* to make a change?

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. 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.

Developer Experience builds the tools and platforms Toast engineers use to write, build, and understand their code. We own local development environments and the inner loop, build tooling and shared libraries, and the internal developer portal and self-service golden paths. We also empower developers across the company by building and maintaining the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services. We contribute to the AI developer workflows that are changing how software gets built at Toast. Our goal is to make every engineer at Toast faster, more independent, and more confident in what they ship.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Toast engineers build software. You'll pick the highest-leverage problems in the developer workflow, design solutions that work across hundreds of services and many teams, and stay hands-on while you build them. AI is quickly changing what developer tooling can do, and you'll help define what an AI-native developer experience looks like at Toast.

About this roll* (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.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (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.

What will help you stand out:

• 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).

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy 
We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.