Staff Software Engineer

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 Engineer on the Catalog and Inventory team you will deliver significant products and core capabilities across teams, building the backend systems behind what our customers sell and stock. This is a hands-on role: most of your time is spent writing and reviewing code. You will be a domain expert in the product area, mentoring team members and enhancing the team’s effectiveness, and you will partner with Product Managers and UX Designers to turn roadmap goals into scalable services.

If you enjoy owning hard backend problems, care about the quality of what you ship, and are a great collaborator, read on!

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Write production code as your primary contribution, and hold the code review bar for the team.

• Conceive and lead the design and execution of efforts with broad customer impact on Toast’s catalog and inventory platform, across multiple teams as necessary.

• Enable your team to consistently measure, maintain and improve the customer experience across functional and non-functional requirements.

• Anticipate changes in technical and product requirements by designing flexible systems, engaging the problem space fully before committing to a solution.

• Design solutions that factor considerations across multiple technical domains, drive alignment across teams, and actively reduce execution complexity.

• Create an environment conducive to growth by modelling humility and inclusiveness and mentoring engineers.

• Foster collaboration beyond your immediate line of business, demonstrating the Toast-wide benefit of your work and securing stakeholder buy-in at multiple levels.

• Design and build using Java, Kotlin, DynamoDB, Pulsar, GraphQL, Big Data tools, and more.

• 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)

• 8+ years of experience designing and delivering scalable backend systems.

• Deep, current hands-on coding ability — you will review other engineers’ code and be expected to catch what they miss.

• Proven technical ownership of complex projects delivered across more than one team, as the domain expert others rely on.

• Strong experience building distributed, event-driven architectures and microservices in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or similar OOP languages.

• Experience designing flexible systems that absorb changing requirements without a rewrite.

• Solid understanding of data architecture and schema design, and strong knowledge of modern database systems (Postgres, DynamoDB).

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS.

• Strong experience with automated testing and continuous delivery, and a habit of supporting what you ship in production.

• Excellent communication skills, able to demonstrate the value of technical work beyond Engineering.

• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment, delivering value continuously.

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; able to break down complexity and drive solutions that scale.

• A passion for building impactful products with