Remote Staff Software Engineer, Catering & Events

Toast; United States; On-site; USD 151,000 - 309,000; Full time

Job summary

Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Catering & Events team, a remote role in the US. You’ll influence end-to-end delivery across services that power complex catering and events workflows, partnering with product managers and designers.

You’ll lead design decisions, mentor engineers, and champion reliability, observability, and AI-powered enhancements to accelerate product impact for our customers.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading the design and delivery of large-scale, distributed systems in production environments.
• Strong backend expertise (Java or Kotlin) with the ability to influence across the full stack when needed.
• Demonstrated ability to design scalable architectures and make high-quality technical tradeoffs across multiple systems and teams.
• Experience navigating ambiguity and driving alignment across stakeholders to deliver impactful solutions.
• Track record of technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standards and practices.
• Deep understanding of microservices architectures, system design and operational considerations (performance, reliability, observability).
• Ability to decompose complex problems into clear strategies and guide teams through execution.
• Strong product and customer mindset, with a history of delivering solutions that create meaningful user and business impact.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across organizational boundaries.
• Experience leveraging AI-based tools or platforms to meaningfully increase engineering effectiveness and/or enable new product capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives that span multiple teams and systems, from concept through production, balancing short-term delivery with long-term system health.
• Own and evolve the architecture of critical systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive technical strategy within your domain, identifying opportunities to simplify systems, reduce complexity, and improve engineering velocity.
• Partner with Product, Design and cross-functional stakeholders to shape ambiguous problem spaces into clear, actionable solutions with measurable customer impact.
• Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising the bar for engineering excellence through guidance, design reviews and hands‑on collaboration.
• Establish and promote best practices for code quality, testing, observability and operational excellence across services.
• Proactively identify and address system-wide risks, performance bottlenecks and scaling challenges.
• Champion the adoption of AI and emerging technologies to unlock new capabilities, improve developer productivity and drive innovation across the organization.

Skills

Java/Kotlin

Distributed systems

Microservices

Mentoring

Observability

AI tooling

Tools

Spring

Kubernetes

JVM ecosystem

Job description

Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Catering & Events team, a remote role in the US. You’ll influence end-to-end delivery across services that power complex catering and events workflows, partnering with product managers and designers.

You’ll lead design decisions, mentor engineers, and champion reliability, observability, and AI-powered enhancements to accelerate product impact for our customers.