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.

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to set the technical direction for our Partner Connect team, which owns how everything outside Toast connects to Toast. That includes the event infrastructure every team at Toast uses to publish data, the frameworks partners and customers use to integrate with restaurants through our APIs, and a new charter to make Toast the source of truth for all the data about the restaurants we serve. 

Your impact will run well past this team. The frameworks Partner Connect builds are what other Toast engineering teams use to expose their data and their events, so the patterns you set here become how dozens of teams ship for years afterward. Get that right and the entire platform moves faster. Few technical roles at Toast have that kind of reach into how other people build.

You're someone who does your best work when the path isn't drawn yet. You write clearly, you build agreement across organizations rather than issuing mandates, and you treat the engineers who use your systems as customers whose experience matters. You'll be based in Bangalore, working with a small and growing team spread across Bangalore, Dublin, and Boston, and partnering closely with the engineering manager and product manager to turn a broad vision into work the team can actually deliver.

Come own a domain that touches every Toast customer and every Toast engineer.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Own the technical strategy for Partner Connect and make it legible to people well outside the team.
• Design the platform that lets strategic partners send us customer data, and the architecture for storing it and serving it to ToastIQ and our AI agents.
• Design the systems that make partner onboarding automated, self-serve, and fast, including sandbox provisioning and a clean path to production.
• Set the frameworks, contracts, and standards other Toast teams use to publish events and expose APIs, and build the feedback loops that tell you whether those teams are succeeding.
• Build partnerships across Commerce, platform, and product organizations so the technical direction here aligns with where Toast is going.
• Partner with the engineering manager and product manager to turn vision into an executable roadmap, holding the balance between new architecture and the systems the team already runs in production.
• Raise the technical bar through architecture, design review, and code review, and mentor engineers across levels as the team grows.
• Guide the team to build for the next order of magnitude of scale, with the monitoring and operational maturity to match.
• Use AI tools in your own workflow and help establish how the team uses them well, including how to critically evaluate what they produce.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 10+ years designing and delivering complex, scalable backend systems, with a track record of technical leadership on work that mattered to the business.
• Demonstrated influence beyond your own team. You've driven a technical direction other teams adopted, and you can describe how you earned that.
• Deep experience with distributed, event-driven architectures and APIs in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or a similar language, on a major cloud platform.
• Strong data architecture and schema design judgment. You've made modeling decisions that had to survive years of new requirements.
• Experience owning a platform or shared service with real internal consumers, and a point of view on how you knew whether those consumers were succeeding.
• Comfort starting from ambiguity. Parts of this charter have no playbook yet, and your first job is to write one.
• A customer-first instinct that extends to developers. You care that an integration is pleasant to build against, not only that it's correct.
• Excellent written communication. At this level a clear design document is one of your highest-value artifacts, especially on a team split across three time zones.
• Strong interpersonal skills. Respectful, empathetic, humble, and genuinely invested in making the engineers around you better.
• Comfortable using AI-powered engineering tools to improve productivity, code quality, and technical decision making, with the judgment to validate what they generate. Experience championing responsible, secure AI adoption across engineering teams is a real plus.

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.