Principal Software Engineer

Toast is building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: running the businesses they love. We’ve grown into a leading hospitality software company in the U.S., and are now entering our next phase of growth—one defined by scale, complexity, and a new class of enterprise customers. Every restaurant is unique, and a restaurant’s menu expresses its individual brand and product offerings. Inside a Toast restaurant, the definition of the menu becomes the common language between guests, servers, and the kitchen. In our digital ordering products, a great menu serves as both a billboard and a roadmap to an excellent dining experience. It is the central hub for restaurant configuration– it determines what guests can order, how the dishes are presented and priced in different contexts, where they are routed for fulfillment and how they are coursed, how they are prepared, whether the ingredients are still available, and how they are classified for reporting. A menu is always evolving: kitchens create new dishes, managers experiment with pricing and presentation, and staff optimize the menu for restaurant operations. We create products to satisfy the vast breadth of our restaurants, from single-location coffee shops to complex enterprise brands with thousands of locations. We offer an extremely powerful and configurable menu platform, and our team exists to ensure that this flexibility can be managed effectively at any scale. This includes feature-rich menu data models, APIs for both first and third party integrations (eg: DoorDash and other ordering partners), and the user experiences for configuring menus that meet a vast variety of needs, from complex customer segments (eg: Pizza shops) to our evolving Retail platform. We are looking for a visionary engineer who is motivated by these challenges and eager to transform our menus architecture to meet the dynamic needs of our customers and our rapidly growing business. As a Principal Software Engineer on the Menus team, you will take ownership of this essential function, making strategic technical decisions that enhance our capabilities and ensure scalability. You will have the opportunity to make a huge impact in a critical space. Your leadership will drive excellence within the team and influence our broader engineering community, setting new standards and contributing to our collective success. About this roll * (Responsibilities) Lead the evolution of our Menus architecture and data models, delivering scalable solutions that have significant business impact. Define and implement frameworks and processes that guarantee the quality, resilience, and scalability of our user experiences and API platform. Develop and execute technical strategies to solve complex business challenges, leveraging data-driven decisions to prioritize impactful changes. Establish guiding technical and delivery principles that influence engineering practices across the broader engineering organization. Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, inclusivity, and engineering excellence. Build and maintain strong partnerships across lines of business, aligning technical solutions with strategic objectives. Do you have the right ingredients* ? (Requirements) Minimum education: BE or B.Tech in a technology-related field 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong background in back-end development using Java, Kotlin, or other object-oriented language Proficient with modern API standards and technologies (e.g. REST, GraphQL) Proficient with relational databases and alternative data stores Experience with distributed systems, enterprise messaging systems, and/or microservices Demonstrated ability to deliver high-impact, scalable solutions in complex, multi-product environments. Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with a track record of guiding teams through architectural transformations. Excellent communic