Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent

Toast

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. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join in building AI agents for Toast's Team area, which is part of the Fintech line of business. The Team area is a mission-critical space on which our restaurants rely to manage their staff and optimize their labor. You'll play a key roll* in the design, development, and delivery of autonomous agents that transform how restaurant owners manage their workforce, blending cutting-edge AI with practical restaurant operations. A day in the life (Responsibilities) * Be hands-on in developing and shipping Team Agent products that leverage LLMs and agentic frameworks * Flex your full-stack development muscles with challenging end-to-end tasks in a supportive, collaborative team environment * Partner with product managers, designers, and fellow engineers to build autonomous agents that transform restaurant workforce management * Participate in designing, estimating, implementing, testing, and debugging end-to-end agent solutions * Adopt and advocate for bleeding-edge spec-driven development and agentic development practices * Mentor developers through code-pairing and detailed code, architecture, and project reviews * Champion best practices for agent development, deployment, and quality life cycles * Actively contribute to product design and feature selection discussions for the Team Agent space   What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) * Strong foundation in Java, Kotlin or other object oriented language(s) * Experience with modern web standards and technologies (e.g. React, TypeScript, REST, GraphQL) * Experience or strong interest in using coding agents and adopting agentic development practices * Passion for building autonomous agents and working with LLMs * A proven track record of building partnerships across engineering, product, customer success, and other stakeholders * Experience and interest in mentoring peers * Experience maintaining a high bar for quality, and guiding teams to hold a high bar for the technical quality of their deliverables. * Strong customer empathy and a drive to make their lives better through a thoughtful user experience, robust technical solutions, and continuous product improvement Special Sauce* (Nonessential Ingredients) * Experience designing agentic products * Experience building systems that leverage LLMs and other ML models * Experience with event-driven distributed systems * Solid understanding of workforce management * Solid understanding of restaurant operations   #LI-HYBRID #BI-Hybrid 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. How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks 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. 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 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences. We Thrive Together 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 restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast. 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. ------ For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Toast

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’re not your traditional tech company and we don’t aim to be. Going against the grain is in our DNA. Building a revolutionary product begins with revolutionary thinking. That’s why we value diversity of background and lived experience. Together, we empower restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight their guests. We pair our deep understanding of the restaurant industry with powerful cloud based software and restaurant-grade hardware to deliver an intuitive all-in-one platform. Join us on our mission to empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive. Fintech at Toast operates one of the most critical portions of the Toast infrastructure: processing payments on behalf of our restaurants and ensuring that restaurants are paid in a timely manner. Payment processing is a key source of Toast’s revenue and also the lifeblood of our customers; we process millions of dollars in transactions per day.   We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Payments team to build our next generation payment processing platform by combining deep payments expertise with experience building AI agents and agentic systems. This platform offers a single, integrated service for payment acceptance across various channels and supports a configurable enterprise approach. It is designed to allow a build-once, available-to-all strategy for both existing and emerging payment methods. The successful candidate will guide and contribute to the development of services providing supporting and core functionality within and around this payment processing solution.   A day in the life (Responsibilities) * Plan, design, build, and deliver features for Toast’s payments products  * Roll - pun intended! - features out to customers, including monitoring for success * Collaborate with our PM (and UX) on the definition and design of features   * Collaborate and partner with a wide array of teams across Toast in order to spread knowledge inter- and intra-team * Participate in designing, estimating, implementing, testing, and debugging end-to-end agent solutions * Adopt and advocate for bleeding-edge spec-driven development and agentic development practices * Champion best practices for agent development, deployment, and quality life cycles * Lead and work with experienced engineers to deliver design and code review   What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) * 8+ years of experience in designing and implementing robust backend services * Experience or strong interest in using coding agents and adopting agentic development practices * Ability to step into a technical leadership role on the team, guiding/coaching/mentor more junior engineers on best practices in architecture, design, coding, testing, deployment, etc. * Proven ability to design and develop scalable and secure APIs that integrate with various internal/external systems * Applied knowledge of best practices in API lifecycle management, including versioning, documentation, and deprecation strategies, with the ability to share this amongst the team and peers * Demonstrated experience with microservices architecture and containerization technologies for enhanced scalability and maintainability Special Sauce (*Nice to Haves)   * Experience designing agentic products * Demonstrated proficiency with DynamoDB or PostgreSQL * Proficiency in Kotlin (or Java and willing to learn Kotlin) and Kotlin-specific frameworks and libraries for building efficient backend solutions * Experience with modern data architectures (event sourcing, OLAP, ETL/ELT, streaming data) * Experience designing payments APIs * Familiarity with PCI-DSS * Familiarity with AI-augmented development workflows and tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or similar)   #LI-HYBRID #BI-Hybrid 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. How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks 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. 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 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences. We Thrive Together 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 restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast. 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. ------ For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Toast

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’re not your traditional tech company and we don’t aim to be. Going against the grain is in our DNA. Building a revolutionary product begins with revolutionary thinking. That’s why we value diversity of background and lived experience. Together, we empower restaurants of all sizes to build great teams, increase revenue, improve operations, and delight their guests. We pair our deep understanding of the restaurant industry with powerful cloud based software and restaurant-grade hardware to deliver an intuitive all-in-one platform. Join us on our mission to empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive. Fintech at Toast operates one of the most critical portions of the Toast infrastructure: processing payments on behalf of our restaurants and ensuring that restaurants are paid in a timely manner. Payment processing is a key source of Toast’s revenue and also the lifeblood of our customers; we process millions of dollars in transactions per day.   We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Payments team to build our next generation payment processing platform by combining deep payments expertise with experience building AI agents and agentic systems. This platform offers a single, integrated service for payment acceptance across various channels and supports a configurable enterprise approach. It is designed to allow a build-once, available-to-all strategy for both existing and emerging payment methods. The successful candidate will guide and contribute to the development of services providing supporting and core functionality within and around this payment processing solution.   A day in the life (Responsibilities) * Plan, design, build, and deliver features for Toast’s payments products  * Roll - pun intended! - features out to customers, including monitoring for success * Collaborate with our PM (and UX) on the definition and design of features   * Collaborate and partner with a wide array of teams across Toast in order to spread knowledge inter- and intra-team * Participate in designing, estimating, implementing, testing, and debugging end-to-end agent solutions * Adopt and advocate for bleeding-edge spec-driven development and agentic development practices * Champion best practices for agent development, deployment, and quality life cycles * Lead and work with experienced engineers to deliver design and code review   What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) * 8+ years of experience in designing and implementing robust backend services * Experience or strong interest in using coding agents and adopting agentic development practices * Ability to step into a technical leadership role on the team, guiding/coaching/mentor more junior engineers on best practices in architecture, design, coding, testing, deployment, etc. * Proven ability to design and develop scalable and secure APIs that integrate with various internal/external systems * Applied knowledge of best practices in API lifecycle management, including versioning, documentation, and deprecation strategies, with the ability to share this amongst the team and peers * Demonstrated experience with microservices architecture and containerization technologies for enhanced scalability and maintainability Special Sauce (*Nice to Haves)   * Experience designing agentic products * Demonstrated proficiency with DynamoDB or PostgreSQL * Proficiency in Kotlin (or Java and willing to learn Kotlin) and Kotlin-specific frameworks and libraries for building efficient backend solutions * Experience with modern data architectures (event sourcing, OLAP, ETL/ELT, streaming data) * Experience designing payments APIs * Familiarity with PCI-DSS * Familiarity with AI-augmented development workflows and tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or similar)   #LI-HYBRID #BI-Hybrid 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. How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks 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. 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 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences. We Thrive Together 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 restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast. 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. ------ For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.