Director, AI Foundations Engineering

Toast; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Toast is seeking a senior engineering leader to grow and guide a distributed team across Ireland and India, shaping the strategy for Toast's internal AI agent ecosystem and delivering robust developer tooling.

You will own components end-to-end, drive adoption with product managers, and establish guardrails with Security, Legal and Finance while tracking meaningful metrics for success.

Qualifications

• 5+ years managing software engineering teams.
• Hands-on use of coding harnesses and LLM-based tooling.
• Ability to turn fast-moving technology into a clear roadmap and make prioritization calls.
• Ability to communicate and influence at director/executive level, including with non-engineering functions.
• Track record delivering internal platforms or developer tooling with measurable adoption.
• Solid foundation building and operating distributed systems or SaaS products.
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple countries and time zones.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of components within the internal agent platform from design through production, including integrations with Toast systems.
• Drive adoption across R&D and the broader company by partnering with product managers during customer research.
• Establish guardrails for agent usage with Security, Legal and Finance, including access controls and data handling.
• Define and report metrics that matter for the team to AI Foundations and R&D leadership.
• Stay hands-on with latest agentic development practices and model the way the team works.
• Champion the use of AI tools and practices to accelerate development and set the bar for an AI-first engineering organization.

Skills

Team management

LLM tooling

Roadmap strategy

Executive communication

Internal platform delivery

Distributed systems

SaaS products

Global teams

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

Toast is seeking a senior engineering leader to grow and guide a distributed team across Ireland and India, shaping the strategy for Toast's internal AI agent ecosystem and delivering robust developer tooling.

You will own components end-to-end, drive adoption with product managers, and establish guardrails with Security, Legal and Finance while tracking meaningful metrics for success.