Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Job Summary
Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Machine Learning Platform team, shaping the systems that will power Toast's ML capabilities into the future. The role involves driving architectural direction, delivering foundational infrastructure, and elevating fellow engineers.
What You'll Need to Thrive
- 8+ years delivering complex backend or infrastructure systems at scale
- Direct experience building or operating core ML infrastructure
- Mastery of a modern backend language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, or Scala
- Deep proficiency with distributed systems concepts
- Strong understanding of data modeling, query languages, and online/offline data patterns
- Demonstrated technical leadership, with ability to drive cross-team alignment and influence engineering, product, and business stakeholders
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Nice to Haves
- Hands-on experience with open-source or commercial ML platform components
- Experience building or operating experimentation / A-B testing platforms at scale
- Familiarity with real-time streaming systems
- Experience serving LLMs or large deep-learning models in production
- Comfort with Kubernetes and modern cloud-native infrastructure
- Prior work supporting internal-developer-facing platforms with a product mindset
What You'll Do
Own technical direction of the ML Platform — feature store, model hosting and serving, experimentation, training infrastructure — driving architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, latency, and cost
Lead design and delivery of large-scope platform initiatives from conception through production, coordinating across ML, data, and infrastructure teams
Identify and resolve systemic technical challenges: online/offline feature parity, model deployment friction, experimentation velocity, GPU utilization, cross-team dependencies
Set and maintain a high engineering quality bar through hands-on code contributions, design reviews, and mentorship of platform and ML-adjacent engineers
Partner with ML engineering, data science, product, and platform leadership to translate ML strategy into technical roadmaps
Define the paved paths ML teams use to ship models safely — from feature registration through canary rollout, monitoring, and rollback
Leverage AI-augmented development tools to increase development velocity and code quality
Pay & Benefits
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. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.
- Zone A: $193,000—$309,000 USD
- Zone B: $168,000—$269,000 USD
- Zone C: $151,000—$242,000 USD
How Toast Uses AI In Its Hiring Process
We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people.
Our Approach to Hybrid Working
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 restaurant community, regardless of location.
Toast's Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in our culture and design, creating equitable opportunities for all and raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.
Contact Information
To apply, please visit: https://careers.toasttab.com/