Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Job Summary

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. Toast is looking for a hands-on Principal Software Engineer to join the AI & Strategy Engineering team.

What You'll Need To Thrive

• Deep Backend Expertise: Extensive experience in backend languages (Java, Go, Python) with a track record of building complex, distributed systems.
• Applied AI/ML Skills: Practical, hands-on experience deploying Machine Learning models and building with LLMs (e.g., LangChain, RAG architectures, or Model Fine-tuning) in a production environment.
• Technical Complexity: Experience building or deeply integrating with complex enterprise software, specifically custom quoting engines or CRM internals (Salesforce Apex/LWC).
• Systems Architecture: Ability to design event-driven architectures and manage data flow across disparate systems with high integrity.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field.

What Will Help You Stand Out

• Experience building internal "Sales Tech" or "Fintech" tools that directly impact revenue.
• Familiarity with AWS data services (SageMaker, Lambda, SQS).
• A passion for removing "human-in-the-loop" friction through intelligent automation.

Skills

Hands-on Execution: Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting and coding high-performance backend services and ML pipelines. 0-to-1 Development: Build and prototype new internal products from scratch that leverage LLMs and Agentic AI to automate account research, lead prioritization, and complex quoting logic. Core Intelligence Models: Design and implement ML models that provide real-time recommendations to sales users, reducing manual entry and increasing deal velocity. Infrastructure Integration: Develop the backend connective tissue between our custom quoting engine, Salesforce, and internal data lakes to ensure a seamless, low-latency end-to-end experience. Technical Problem Solving: Act as a domain expert to solve complex synchronization and architectural challenges across the GTM stack, ensuring systems are scalable and resilient. Quality & Mentorship: Drive engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, automated testing, and by modeling best practices for SE1-SE3 engineers on the team. Build Great Products: Deliver significant core capabilities that have broad impact; take high-level goals and turn them into sequenced, production-ready code. Problem Solve: Anticipate shifts in product needs and build flexible, decoupled backend systems that can evolve with our AI strategy. Deliver Quality: Ensure the reliability of GTM tools by building deep observability into every service you ship.

Benefits

Base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

• Zone A: $230,000—$368,000 USD
• Zone B: $200,000—$320,000 USD
• Zone C: $180,000—$288,000 USD

About the Role

The Principal Software Engineer will be responsible for the "heavy lifting" of backend engineering and Machine Learning implementation, bridging our custom quoting software and Salesforce with intelligent, agentic workflows that allow sales users to make faster, data-backed decisions.

Qualifications

Hands-on Execution: Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting and coding high-performance backend services and ML pipelines. 0-to-1 Development: Build and prototype new internal products from scratch that leverage LLMs and Agentic AI to automate account research, lead prioritization, and complex quoting logic. Core Intelligence Models: Design and implement ML models that provide real-time recommendations to sales users, reducing manual entry and increasing deal velocity. Infrastructure Integration: Develop the backend connective tissue between our custom quoting engine, Salesforce, and internal data lakes to ensure a seamless, low-latency end-to-end experience. Technical Problem Solving: Act as a domain expert to solve complex synchronization and architectural challenges across the GTM stack, ensuring systems are scalable and resilient. Quality & Mentorship: Drive engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, automated testing, and by modeling best practices for SE1-SE3 engineers on the team. Build Great Products: Deliver significant core capabilities that have broad impact; take high-level goals and turn them into sequenced, production-ready code. Problem Solve: Anticipate shifts in product needs and build flexible, decoupled backend systems that can evolve with our AI strategy. Deliver Quality: Ensure the reliability of GTM tools by building deep observability into every service you ship.

Skills

Hands-on Execution: Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting and coding high-performance backend services and ML pipelines. 0-to-1 Development: Build and prototype new internal products from scratch that leverage LLMs and Agentic AI to automate account research, lead prioritization, and complex quoting logic. Core Intelligence Models: Design and implement ML models that provide real-time recommendations to sales users, reducing manual entry and increasing deal velocity. Infrastructure Integration: Develop the backend connective tissue between our custom quoting engine, Salesforce, and internal data lakes to ensure a seamless, low-latency end-to-end experience. Technical Problem Solving: Act as a domain expert to solve complex synchronization and architectural challenges across the GTM stack, ensuring systems are scalable and resilient. Quality & Mentorship: Drive engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, automated testing, and by modeling best practices for SE1-SE3 engineers on the team. Build Great Products: Deliver significant core capabilities that have broad impact; take high-level goals and turn them into sequenced, production-ready code. Problem Solve: Anticipate shifts in product needs and build flexible, decoupled backend systems that can evolve with our AI strategy. Deliver Quality: Ensure the reliability of GTM tools by building deep observability into every service you ship.

Benefits

Base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

• Zone A: $230,000—$368,000 USD
• Zone B: $200,000—$320,000 USD
• Zone C: $180,000—$288,000 USD