Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI

About the role

Toast is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the New Ventures team and help build a new AI-powered product. You will tackle problems without an established playbook, make decisions that shape the product, and take ideas from early experiments to capabilities customers can depend on, working closely with Product and Design.

Responsibilities

• Own design and delivery of core capabilities for a new AI-powered product, from exploring an approach to launching and improving it.
• Turn ambiguous product problems into working software; build prototypes to test assumptions.
• Build LLM-powered workflows and agents, deciding where to use model reasoning, tools or conventional software.
• Define good performance for AI-powered capabilities: build evaluations around realistic customer tasks and investigate failures.
• Shape the backend services, APIs and data models that let the product evolve quickly.
• Partner across Toast on integrations, technical dependencies and ownership of shared capabilities.
• Make tradeoffs across customer experience, feasibility, reliability, latency and cost.
• Implement critical components, debug difficult problems, own rollouts, and mentor the team including on use of AI coding assistants and agents.

Requirements

• 8-12 years building backend services, APIs and production software.
• Extensive experience with an object-oriented language such as Java or Kotlin, with deep understanding of testing and software design.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems and cloud-native services on AWS.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered applications, including agents that use tools or APIs for multi-step tasks.
• Experience designing evaluations for AI systems.
• Proficiency with AI coding assistants and coding agents across the development lifecycle.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams; strong communication.

Nice to have

• Early-stage product experience, GraphQL APIs, working across the stack.

Hybrid role in Bengaluru, Karnataka.