Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Toast engineers build software. You’ll pick the highest-leverage problems in the developer workflow, design solutions that work across hundreds of services and many teams, and stay hands-on while you build them. AI is quickly changing what developer tooling can do, and you’ll help define what an AI-native developer experience looks like at Toast., * Set technical direction and long-term architecture across Developer Experience’s areas: local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal.

• Oversee the architecture of the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services.
• Stay hands-on: design, build, and ship the highest leverage and most cross-cutting parts of the platform yourself.
• Collaborate with Product using data and direct engineer feedback to find the biggest sources of friction in the developer workflow, and help turn them into a prioritized, measurable roadmap.
• Design self-service golden paths and paved roads that let product teams create and evolve services with minimal friction or hand-holding.
• Drive technical alignment with partner teams in areas like AI, CICD and Cloud Infrastructure so the end-to-end developer journey feels like one cohesive experience.
• Partner with customer-facing teams to align developer platform solutions with customer and business needs.
• Raise the bar across the team through design reviews, mentorship, and code-pairing, and by growing other engineers into technical leaders.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript) and comfort working across several.
• Strong experience with build systems and dependency management at scale (e.g. Gradle, Maven, npm), including managing software migrations across hundreds of services.
• A track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, from defining the problem through design, delivery, and adoption.
• Experience designing developer-facing products such as CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals, with a focus on usability and adoption.
• Hands-on experience with, and strong opinions about, AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices.
• Strong communication skills, including writing clear technical strategy and design documents and influencing without authority.
• Deep empathy for engineers as customers, and a habit of measuring outcomes rather than shipping features.

What will help you stand out:

• Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogs (e.g. Backstage).
• Experience building or integrating LLM-powered developer tools, coding agents, or MCP servers.
• Experience with containerized or cloud-based development environments (e.g. Dev Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS).
• Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (e.g. DORA, SPACE, build and test analytics).

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

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, boncommissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

Zone A

$193,000-$309,000 USD

Zone B

$168,000-$269,000 USD

Zone C

$151,000-$242,000 USD

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. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more

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. Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we’ll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future., 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., At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient-when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work-raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.