Senior Software Engineer – Distributed Systems & Networking

Toast is a rapidly growing company that's revolutionizing how the restaurant industry does business by pairing technology with an extraordinary commitment to customer success. We help restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences through our platform that combines restaurant point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support. Join us as we empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong experience building and operating distributed systems to join the team that connects Toast's customers, services, and infrastructure. Every request to Toast depends on that connectivity, and you'll write software that improves the reliability and scalability of the systems behind it, from customer-facing traffic to service-to-service communication.

Traffic and the number of services at Toast are growing rapidly, so the team is scaling the infrastructure that connects them while keeping it dependable. This is an opportunity to apply your software engineering experience to network and traffic problems at scale. If you're excited to build the foundations for how Toast's services connect, working closely with teammates in the US, we'd love to hear from you.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate software that helps Toast's services connect and route traffic reliably.
• Improve the scalability, resilience, and observability of critical systems as Toast grows.
• Take end-to-end ownership of systems, making changes safer to roll out and failures easier to detect, diagnose, and resolve.
• Investigate production issues, participate in on-call, and turn what we learn into lasting improvements.
• Collaborate with engineers across Toast on projects that span services and infrastructure.
• Contribute to technical designs and raise team standards through thoughtful code reviews and technical discussions.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to other team members.
• Use AI tooling as a genuine part of your workflow, not an afterthought.

**This is a hybrid role requiring two days a week in the office

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 5+ years of back-end software engineering experience in Kotlin or another relevant language.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, including designing for reliability, diagnosing failures, and scaling services.
• Experience owning and operating production systems, with solid instincts around testing and code quality.
• A track record of tackling ambiguous, high-impact challenges and delivering scalable solutions.
• Curiosity about how traffic moves through large-scale systems, and the motivation to learn quickly and apply what you learn.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working across teams and time zones.

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Experience building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
• Familiarity with network or traffic-management concepts such as routing, load balancing, DNS, or HTTP.
• Experience with AWS, infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), or cloud networking.
• Experience with service meshes (such as Envoy or Istio) or operating high-availability traffic systems.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend services written primarily in Kotlin
• A service mesh with an xDS control plane for service-to-service traffic
• AWS networking, including VPCs, transit gateways, and load balancers
• Terraform and Atlantis for infrastructure as code
• Cloudflare for edge routing and DNS
• AI-assisted development tools as part of daily engineering

AI at Toast

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.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy 

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 https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

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: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

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.

Apply today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected].

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