Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), or New York (hybrid)

About Toast

Toast builds technology that helps food and beverage businesses run smoother, serve customers better, and grow with confidence. Our platform brings together the tools teams need to power daily operations—while turning complexity into clear, actionable insights. We’re purpose-built for the pace of hospitality, and we’re investing in new experiences that make great businesses easier to run at any scale.

About this role*

We’re looking for a startup-minded engineer to join our New Ventures team as one of its earliest members. You will be a core builder on a 0→1 venture that we are validating and building from the ground up.

As part of a small, focused engineering squad within this venture, you’ll help architect and build the experiences that will define this new business line. This role is intentionally open to a wide range of experience levels, although listed as Staff to start. We aren't looking for a specific number of years; we are looking for a scrappy, product-minded engineer who can use AI-assisted development to move at terminal velocity.

You’ll be joining a tight-knit team of product, design, and engineering peers to turn a fuzzy early concept into a functional, shippable MVP and beyond.

In this role, you will:

• Build from 0→1: Partner with a small team of engineers to architect and build the technical foundation for this new venture—writing the first lines of code and evolving them as we learn.
• Ship at Terminal Velocity: Use AI coding assistants, LLMs, and modern automation to 10x your output. You’ll focus on high-level logic and solving core user problems while leveraging tools to handle boilerplate and rapid iteration.
• Architect for Flexibility: Help design systems that are "just enough" to ship today but flexible enough to pivot tomorrow. You understand that in the early stages, the ability to change direction is a feature, not a bug.
• Create "Real" Experiences: Move beyond static mocks. You’ll build functional prototypes and clickable flows that feel like the final product, allowing the team to test hypotheses with real users immediately.
• Execute End-to-End: Operate as a true generalist. Whether it’s building out a new API, refining a UI interaction, or adjusting a database schema, you do whatever is necessary to keep momentum high.
• Make Smart Tradeoffs: Work with the team to decide when to "hack" a solution for a quick experiment and when to spend the extra time on a hardened foundation.
• Operate with Bias for Action: Run with a "ship-to-learn" mindset. You’ll validate assumptions via low-fi experiments, dogfooding, and rapid refinement rather than waiting for perfect specs.
• Collaborate across Disciplines: Partner closely with Design and Product to ensure technical feasibility is baked into the vision from the start, helping to shape the "what" and "why" through a technical lens.

Do you have the right ingredients*?

• 0→1 Mentality: High comfort working in high-ambiguity environments where learning is the primary output and "done" is an iteration, not a finish line.
• Generalist Depth: You’re a builder at heart, comfortable jumping into any part of the stack—frontend, backend, or infra—to get a feature live, and willing to take on occasional Android work when needed.
• AI-Native Workflow: You have a clear, proven pattern of using AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, LLM agents) to accelerate your coding, debugging, and synthesis. You can speak specifically to how these tools help you ship better work faster.
• Product Intuition: You don't just "build to spec." You understand user needs and can translate complex workflows into interfaces and systems that feel intuitive and calm.
• Technical Scrappiness: You have a "builder" mindset. You’ve likely built side projects, worked at an early-stage startup, or participated in rapid experimentation teams where resourcefulness was key.
• Team-First Attitude: You thrive in small, collaborative pods. You’re proactive about aligning with your fellow engineers and stakeholders to keep the project moving.

Special sauce*

• You’ve worked on early-stage products, internal incubations, or rapid experimentation teams.
• You have a history of building and shipping products quickly, evidenced by a portfolio of work, personal projects, or open-source contributions.

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.

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), or New York (hybrid)

Years spent building on the restaurant front lines taught us how to build for speed, reliability, and complexity. Built for the dinner rush, our cloud-based platform and tough hardware now power high-velocity operations beyond restaurants. Join us to expand Toast’s impact to other industries – helping all kinds of business operators delight their customers, do what they love, and thrive.

Bready* to make a change?

Toast’s New Ventures business unit has the goal of researching, developing, and eventually scaling a new generation of products and business lines that can have a substantial impact on Toast’s long-term growth. In this unique role, you will be one of the founding engineers on one of our New Venture teams. If you are the type of engineer who would love to build from scratch on the existing Toast ecosystem, this could be the perfect job for you.

We are in the early stages of building out features that cater to new types of establishments, and have seen an exciting level of interest in early conversations with operators. We’re scrappy and motivated to capture this growth, with many opportunities to make a big impact in this emerging space!

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Be a strong independent contributor backend development for a new team to address critical operator needs currently unmet by Toast. Pair closely with the Staff engineer to ship our roadmap.
• Contribute to the architecture and backend implementation for key features and components for the New Venture across the Toast codebase.
• Understand operator needs and contribute to the team’s business strategy.
• Collaborate closely with New Ventures Leads to successfully launch an MVP and facilitate its scalable adoption by a broad customer base.
• Navigate diverse codebases across disciplines to consistently deliver high-quality code within established timelines.
• Demonstrate a high degree of ownership in all aspects of development.
• 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)

• Proficiency in Kotlin (preferred) or Java
• A track record of significant technical impact on your team.
• Experience in 0 -> 1 builds.
• Hands-on experience in building complex, large-scale distributed systems in production environments.
• Strong experience in distributed systems, asynchronous messaging, event-driven architecture, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver clean, maintainable, and resilient code that withstands the test of time.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience in communicating technical designs within their team.
• Act as a collaborative and solution-oriented partner to leadership and colleagues.

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.