Principal TA Systems Architect

Role Overview

At Toast, Talent Acquisition runs on its tools. Greenhouse, GoodTime, and BrightHire are where every requisition, interview, and hiring decision happens. As a Principal TA Systems Architect, you will be the technical owner of the TA tech stack: the person who configures it, integrates it, secures it, measures it, and decides where it goes next.

You will partner closely with TA Operations, People Systems, People Analytics, IT, Security, Legal, and Procurement. You will also own vendor relationships and hold partners to a high standard. This is an individual contributor role with a path to building and leading a small team as the function scales.

Responsibilities

• Own the Stack: Serve as system owner and top-tier administrator for Greenhouse, GoodTime, and BrightHire — configuration, permissions, workflows, approval chains, compliance settings, and release management.
• Integration Layer: Own the integration layer between TA systems and the rest of the People stack (HRIS, background check, assessments, sourcing, offer tooling) using API-based integrations and middleware.
• Issue Resolution: Run intake-to-resolution on system issues: triage, root-cause, fix, and communicate resolution.
• Change Management: Maintain sandbox testing, documented configuration decisions, release notes, and user communications.
• Roadmap & Cross-functional Partnership: Work with recruiters, sourcers, coordinators, and TA leadership to translate workflow challenges into system solutions. Build and own a multi-quarter TA systems roadmap.
• Architecture & Governance: Partner with People Systems, People Analytics, IT, Security, and Legal to ensure clean data flows, sensible access models, and defensible privacy/records practices.
• Tooling Evaluation: Evaluate new tooling, including AI-enabled recruiting tools, with rigorous pilot design, success criteria, security reviews, and recommendations.
• Vendor Management: Manage day-to-day vendor relationships, handle escalations, and support contract renewals and new purchases alongside Procurement and Finance.
• Build & Automate: Write scripts, queries, and automations for data cleanup, bulk updates, custom reporting, and alerting on integration failures.
• Reporting & Runbooks: Build and maintain TA reporting and dashboards. Document architecture, integrations, configuration decisions, and runbooks.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years in HR/TA systems, People Systems, or a closely adjacent systems role, including hands-on ownership of an ATS at scale.
• Proven experience gathering business requirements, translating them into technical solutions, and executing end-to-end (project management, UAT, release management, and production support).
• Deep administrative expertise in at least one core recruiting platform with the ability to ramp quickly on new tools.
• Technical fluency with REST APIs, webhooks, JSON, and iPaaS/middleware tooling (e.g., Workato, Tray, Merge, Zapier).
• Experience integrating an ATS with an HRIS (Workday, UKG, or similar) and understanding downstream recruiting data flow.
• Proven vendor management experience: renewals, escalations, and service-level commitments.
• Excellent partnership skills with non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical knowledge of compliance requirements around recruiting data (EEOC, OFCCP, GDPR/CCPA, data retention, interview recording consent).

Preferred

• Greenhouse experience strongly preferred.
• Direct administrative experience with GoodTime and BrightHire.
• Experience standing up, migrating, or consolidating an ATS.
• Prior people management or experience mentoring and leading a systems function.
• Experience evaluating and deploying AI tooling inside a live recruiting workflow.
• Familiarity with high-volume and field-based hiring models.