Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead, Retail

About the Role

The Retail organization at Toast is focused on building foundational technology to support a rapidly expanding vertical. We emphasize early learnings and remain closely aligned with our customers, engaging in frequent conversations with our initial retail partners to understand their needs, pain points, and feature requests. We’re looking for engineers to help make our product work for our largest customers (e.g., large grocery stores and local convenience store chains), creating integrations and back-office tools beyond current platform offerings.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable systems critical to customers’ success.
• Define and drive long-term technical architecture and strategy across the entire organization, aligning executive business goals with platform capabilities.
• Design solutions that anticipate and accommodate future needs while considering tradeoffs.
• Effectively communicate technical direction.
• Sponsor and mentor senior engineering talent (Staff and Senior Staff engineers) to grow the next generation of technical leaders across Toast.
• Act as a force multiplier in improving engineering productivity.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations.
• Leverage cutting-edge AI tools to enhance development workflows, improve velocity, and contribute to innovation and productivity.

Requirements

• 9+ years of experience building and shipping production software to customers.
• Experience with Java, Kotlin, or other object-oriented programming languages.
• Approach work with humility, empathy, and deep respect for peers.
• Articulate sophisticated project roadmaps and empower engineering cohorts to drive them toward fruition.
• Startup mindset in driving initiatives and ability to find order in ambiguity.
• Passionate about making users happy and seeing people use products in the wild.
• Growth-oriented mindset focused on continuous elevation of craft and domain.
• Ability to establish oneself as a trusted technical authority making decisions that secure immediate wins and long-term strategic goals.

Interview & Hiring Process

Toast uses AI tools to assist interviewers with note-taking, summarization, and documentation. All hiring decisions are made by people. Candidates are requested to complete interviews and assessments without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots unless notified in advance.