Staff Software Engineer — Catering & Events (Remote)

Toast; United States; Remote; USD 168,000 - 309,000; Full time

Job summary

Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Catering & Events team to help build and evolve a product that manages complex catering workflows. You will work with product managers and designers to bring ideas to life remotely from the US.

You will lead architecture across services, drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, and promote best practices for performance, reliability, and observability. This role offers opportunities to apply AI to enhance engineering velocity.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading design and delivery of large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong backend expertise in Java or Kotlin.
• Ability to design scalable architectures and make high-quality 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 across teams from concept to production.
• Own and evolve the architecture of critical systems for scalability and reliability.
• Drive technical strategy within your domain, identifying opportunities to simplify systems and improve 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

Backend engineering

Java or Kotlin

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Microservices

System architecture

Observability

AI for engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Catering & Events team to help build and evolve a product that manages complex catering workflows. You will work with product managers and designers to bring ideas to life remotely from the US.

You will lead architecture across services, drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, and promote best practices for performance, reliability, and observability. This role offers opportunities to apply AI to enhance engineering velocity.