Principal Software Engineer, Configuration Platform

About the role

As a member of the Config Platform team, you will be at the heart of Toast’s most critical infrastructure. We are the high-concurrency engine powering live system updates across the entire Toast ecosystem. Whether it’s a menu change in Ireland or a pricing update for a 100-location enterprise, it all flows through our systems. We empower our customers with the ability to transform their operations in real-time with consistency and reliability.

Why this team?

• Scale and Resiliency: We are the highest-trafficked service at Toast. Our platform is mission-critical to core operations like ordering and business management; if we aren't performing, the business stops.
• Expanding the Vision: We are advancing a sophisticated change management vision. We give customers the confidence and precision tools they need to manage complex configurations and run their global businesses with ease.
• Platform Enablement: Beyond serving end-users, we are an ever-evolving internal platform. We aim to empower other Toast engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale their own features quickly on top of our robust architecture.
• Future-Proofing: As our customer base grows at a phenomenal rate, we are re-architecting our infrastructure to handle increasing technical complexity and global scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable systems that are critical to our customers’ success.
• Define and drive long-term technical architecture and strategy across the entire organization, aligning executive business goals with platform capabilities.
• Design solutions that anticipate and accommodate future needs while considering tradeoffs.
• Effectively communicate technical direction.
• Sponsor and mentor senior engineering talent (Staff and Senior Staff engineers) to grow the next generation of technical leaders across Toast.
• Act as a force multiplier in improving engineering productivity.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations.
• 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.

Requirements

• Approach your work with humility, empathy, and deep respect for your peers.
• Articulate sophisticated project roadmaps and empower engineering cohorts to drive them toward fruition.
• Proven track record of delivering and operating mission-critical production services at scale.
• Maintain end-to-end ownership over high-throughput systems while navigating the complexities of distributed architecture.
• Embody a growth-oriented mindset focused on continuous elevation of your craft and domain.
• Establish yourself as a trusted technical authority capable of making decisions that secure both immediate wins and long-term strategic goals.

Tech Stack

Our products run on a stack that ranges from guest and restaurant-facing Android tablets, to backend Kotlin and Java services, to internal, guest-facing, and restaurant-facing web apps. Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written using Kotlin/Java and DropWizard; we use AWS extensively, ranging from DynamoDB to RDS to Lambda. We have our own platform for dealing with user management, canary deployments, and robust load balancing. We store data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilize Apache Spark for large-scale data workloads including query and batch processing. The web front-end is built using React and ES6. Our main point-of-sale application is an Android application written in Java and Kotlin. For data between tablets and our cloud platform, we rely on Pulsar event-driven architecture along with some RabbitMQ clusters as well as direct tablet communication to the back end.

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.

Pay

The 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.

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

Learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

Benefits

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.

Schedule

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. Learn more about our in-office expectations by region.