Director of Globalization

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. Toast is accelerating its global expansion, moving rapidly from our foundational markets to a multi-region, multilingual global platform. We are seeking a highly strategic, operationally rigorous Director of Globalization to own the strategy, platform and execution that will scale Toast from English and our initial localized markets to 10+ well-functioning global languages. Situated within our International Engineering organization, this leader will blend operational execution with technical platform enablement, transforming globalization from a manual service into a seamless, productized capability. You will architect the automated pipelines, tooling, and AI-driven workflows that empower decentralized engineering and product teams to deploy localized experiences natively, with minimal friction. A day in the life (Responsibilities) Improve the existing operational playbooks, automated systems and localization frameworks required to rapidly scale Toast's product UX, marketing collateral and legal assets across 10+ languages with zero friction – both internationally and for non-native speakers in English-speaking markets Lead a team of localization program managers, setting direction, operating model and performance standards Define the requirements for internal tooling, APIs, Translation Management Systems (TMS), and CI/CD localization pipelines that allow product teams to build globally ready features seamlessly. Support engineering in building these capabilities and help drive strong adoption Actively design and implement LLM and AI-translation workflows to automate high-volume translation, automated quality assurance (LQA) and cost-efficient scaling Partner deeply with Product, Marketing, Customer Enablement, Engineering, and Design to evangelize internationalization best practices, reducing delivery bottlenecks and ensuring high internal adoption of globalization workflows Oversee the global vendor strategy, managing Language Service Providers and translation technology vendors, against rigorous quality, speed, and cost SLAs Serve as the centralized authority bridging R&D with G&A teams (Legal, Marketing, Customer Enablement, Go-To-Market) to streamline contract, collateral and product translation pipelines What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) Proven leadership spanning technical program management, platform operations, or engineering within globalization and localization domains at a hyper-growth SaaS platform Direct experience scaling a product ecosystem out of its home country into a highly complex, multi-language global footprint Strong understanding of continuous localization infrastructure, string management workflows, asset repositories, and modern TMS integration Practical experience deploying AI/ML, Large Language Models (LLMs), or advanced machine translation (MT) workflows to optimize operational scale and quality The ability to speak the language of developers and product managers, ensuring translation processes align with modern agile software delivery while equally being able to lean into Marketing and Customer Enablement teams and their needs Experience managing large-scale external vendor budgets, contract negotiations, and multi-region LSP performance metrics 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 provi