Principal 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 Principal Engineer / architect you will be responsible for creating a technical strategy and coordinating the designs for meeting the needs of Toast’s largest restaurant brands. You will partner with Product Managers to develop the technology roadmap that enables enterprise customers to leverage the power of Toast. You will also work closely with technical leaders and implementation teams across the organization to deliver robust, scalable solutions with integrations to customers’ external systems. While the role is primarily internally-facing, it requires infrequent interactions with enterprise customers, listening to their requirements and providing expert guidance as they deploy Toast.

If you’re a technical leader or a solutions architect, experienced with enterprise SaaS, passionate about customer value, and a great collaborator, read on! 

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Lead the evolution of Toast’s backend architecture, frameworks, and data models with a strong focus on delivery efficiency, system scalability, and resilience.
• Design and build the next generation of accounting and financial systems using Java, Kotlin, DynamoDB, Pulsar, GraphQL, Big Data tools, and more.
• Define and implement scalable engineering practices, delivery frameworks, and coding standards that raise the technical bar across the org.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, UX, QA, and multiple engineering teams to deliver robust, customer-facing solutions.
• Build and maintain strong partnerships across business units, aligning technology strategies with key company objectives.
• Champion data-driven decision making by developing strategies and prioritizing initiatives with high impact on user and business outcomes.
• Mentor and grow engineers across levels, promoting a culture of inclusivity, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
• Guide and influence the broader technical roadmap and architecture strategy for Toast.
• 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)

• 12+ years of experience designing and delivering complex, scalable backend systems.
• Proven technical leadership on mission-critical projects, with the ability to influence across multiple teams.
• Strong experience building distributed, event-driven architectures and microservices in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or similar OOP languages.
• Deep understanding of data architecture and schema design; experience with DynamoDB is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong knowledge of modern database systems (Postgres, SQL Server, DynamoDB).
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment, delivering value continuously.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to break down complexity and drive solutions that scale.
• A passion for building impactful products with a customer-first mindset.
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills—respectful, empathetic, humble, and inclusive.
• A growth mindset with a desire to constantly learn and uplift others.
• Comfortable balancing velocity with platform stability and long-term archi