Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Network Engineering

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. As a Staff Software Engineer on Traffic Engineering at Toast, you will design, build, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge, through cloud networking, down to service-to-service routing. The team owns the systems that move traffic at Toast: edge and CDN, DNS, cloud networking, and the service mesh and control plane that route requests between services. Toast has invested in a strong foundation of networking and platform infrastructure. This role is an opportunity to build on that foundation by evolving how services connect, route, and secure traffic at scale — making the platform faster, safer, and easier for service owners to depend on. AI-assisted development is deeply embedded in engineering at Toast. The majority of engineers use AI tools daily, and AI agents participate in code review, build triage, and operational workflows. This is your chance to shape how the team's traffic platform evolves, building systems that empower both humans and agents to operate with speed and confidence. A day in the life (Responsibilities) Design, build, deploy, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge through cloud networking down to service-to-service traffic Lead complex, multi-team projects that improve how Toast services discover, route to, secure, and observe one another Own the reliability of critical traffic infrastructure end-to-end, from design through on-call response, post-incident learning, and long-term hardening Design solutions that anticipate future scale and product needs (multi-region, new protocols, evolving service-mesh patterns) while making explicit tradeoffs Partner with the team on cloud networking, edge routing (Cloudflare), DNS, and IaC-driven automation Act as a force multiplier: mentor engineers, improve developer ergonomics for service owners, and make the platform easier and safer to operate Lead through influence across multiple teams and reporting lines, setting technical direction and driving adoption of platform standards without direct authority 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) Experience shipping and operating mission-critical production services Led complex projects that span multiple teams and have presented technical plans to both engineering and non-engineering audiences Have a growth mindset with an emphasis on improving yourself, the engineers around you, and your functional area Deep, hands-on experience in Kotlin or another JVM language (Java, Scala) Built or operated a service mesh in production — Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, or similar Managed cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar) Hands-on experience with DNS and edge routing through a CDN such as Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Akamai, or Fastly Working knowledge of TLS — termination, mTLS, and certificate lifecycle management at scale Comfortable working across the networking stack and are comfortable digging into different network layers 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 t