About Toast

Our focus is on building the platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. And because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people, restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in experiences that will power their restaurant of the future. We build experiences that help make operating and growing a business and delighting customers easier and scalable. It's why tens of thousands of businesses love Toast.

Toast IQ is our AI assistant, designed to give restaurant operators smarter insights, deeper personalization, and the ability to take action across the Toast ecosystem. Building on this foundation, we're investing heavily in agentic capabilities by giving operators the ability to delegate real work to Toast IQ, not just view insights.

We're entering an exciting phase of expanding this product to tens of thousands of businesses. That expansion depends on getting the core interaction patterns right once, and getting the whole company aligned behind them. That's where you come in.

About this role

As the Principal Product Designer for Toast IQ Core, you will define the interaction language for agentic experiences at Toast including the patterns, behaviors, and components that every team building on top of Toast IQ will use. This isn't a single-surface design role. Your job is to figure out what "good" looks like when a restaurant operator moves from viewing a dashboard to delegating work to an AI agent, and then to get product, engineering, and design teams across the company to build on that foundation instead of inventing their own.

You'll set direction hands-on, in Figma, in prototypes, in critique, and through influence: building the conviction and relationships needed for other teams to adopt a pattern language you define, not just execute your own roadmap. You'll partner closely with product, engineering, data science, go-to-market, and conversational and service designers to define the future of intelligence at Toast.

This is a highly visible, individual-contributor role for someone who wants outsized leverage over how an entire product area feels and works.

The right ingredients (Requirements)

• Systems ownership: Define and evangelize the core interaction patterns, behaviors, and component language for agentic experiences across Toast IQ. Building a system that other designers and teams design on top of, not just shipping your own features.
• Organizational influence: Build conviction across product, engineering, and GTM leadership for a UX point of view they didn't already have. Agentic UX at Toast's scale is largely undefined territory, you're not executing an established pattern, you're setting one and getting others to follow it.
• Leadership: Proven track record leading high-impact design initiatives at a principal level: defining new interaction paradigms (not just refining existing ones) and driving their adoption beyond your own immediate team.
• Execution: Lead end-to-end design for core UX/UI within Toast's AI ecosystem across web and native mobile, driving prototyping and experimentation for AI features like memory, personalization, agentic workflows, and actions.
• AI-native design experience: Have shipped a 0-to-1 AI or agentic product experience, not just designed features that use AI under the hood. Deep understanding of emerging AI use cases and tooling, plus foundational user-centered design, usability, and accessibility standards.
• Pro-research: Proven ability and desire to conduct and coordinate data analysis, user research, and usability testing to inform design decisions.
• Tools: Proficiency with emerging AI tools (Claude, Replit, V0, etc.) is essential, as well as design tools like Figma, Miro, and other collaborative platforms.
• Partner collaboration: Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively across product, engineering, GTM, and data science to define requirements and align on goals.
• Mentorship: Mentor designers at all levels and act as a design-quality bar-raiser across the org, fostering a culture of innovation and AI adoption. 

What we'll ask to see

Case studies that show you defining a new interaction paradigm, not just refining an existing one, and driving adoption of it beyond your own team or product surface. We're evaluating systems thinking and organizational influence as much as visual craft.

About You

You are a dynamic leader with proven impact in previous roles who is ready and willing to take on new challenges! You’re excited to join the remotely distributed group of product designers, user researchers, design ops leaders, and product managers that compose the Toast Design team. You embody the tenets that drive Toast’s Design practice: 

1. You have a founder’s mentality: and exhibit ownership of outcomes over outputs. You own the quality and outcomes associated with full end to end experiences.
2. You lift others up: and recognize you don’t have to be a manager to engage and exhibit true leadership. You find formal ways to utilize your personal skill set to uplevel those around you.
3. You drive action through influence: and appreciate that building trusting and productive relationships with those around you is integral to driving action. You build strong relationships to enact influence throughout the entirety of the area of the business you work within.
4. You build strong perspectives: and guide yourself and your teams to make good decisions quickly and often. You collaboratively make well informed decisions with large scale impact across the area of the business you work within.
5. You raise the bar: and commit to continually improving the technical skills relevant to your role. You find large scale, creative methods to continually build your skill set.

Our Spread* of Total Rewards

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.

*Bread puns encouraged but not required

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.

#LI-REMOTE