Staff Software Engineer - Application Infrastructure

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 are looking for an experienced software engineer to play a critical role in further scaling and developing Toast’s cloud platform and infrastructure. Toast’s platform processes billions of requests per day from hundreds of internal services and hundreds of thousands of mobile devices; these numbers grow exponentially year over year as we add new restaurants and capabilities to the platform. Our team is responsible for developing secure, observable, highly available, large-scale shared services and infrastructure. A day in the life (Responsibilities) Architect, design, and deliver ultra-reliable, high-performance services and infrastructure used by millions Uncover and resolve performance bottlenecks across infrastructure, databases, and APIs Define and enable adherence to engineering best practices, coding standards, and architectural guidelines Collaborate closely with the Product team to influence features, technical direction, and long-term product vision 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) Hands-on experience building and operating complex, mission-critical, large-scale distributed systems in the Cloud Expertise in asynchronous messaging, event-driven architecture, APIs, and integration patterns Track record of delivering clean, maintainable, and resilient code that stands the test of time Proficiency in Java or Kotlin preferred (experience in other modern programming languages also valued) Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with demonstrated ability to align and inspire cross-functional teams A demonstrated record of mentoring junior team members and enhancing the team's effectiveness Tech Stack Our team builds and operates on a modern, cloud-native stack with heavy use of AWS, developing services and shared libraries in Kotlin and Go backed by PostgreSQL and DynamoDB. Infrastructure is provisioned and managed with Terraform. We oversee Toast’s sharded PostgreSQL databases, drive the organization’s use of Apache Pulsar to enable event-driven architecture at scale, and provide developers with tools and services to easily schedule recurring jobs. Our systems also power customer engagement, integrating with SMS and email providers to reliably deliver millions of messages per day. We embrace AI-driven software development at Toast, using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and more. 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 . The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can l