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, shape product decisions and take ideas from early experiments to capabilities customers can depend on.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and delivery of core capabilities for a new AI-powered product, from exploration to launch and improvement.
• 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 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 with teams across Toast on integrations and dependencies; work with Product and Design on trade-offs.
• Stay close to the code and production behaviour; mentor others and use AI coding assistants and agents across development, testing and debugging.

Requirements

• 8 to 12 years building backend services, APIs and production software.
• Extensive experience with an object-oriented language such as Java or Kotlin, with strong testing and software design.
• Building and scaling distributed systems and cloud-native services on AWS.
• Shipping and operating LLM-powered applications, including agents that use tools or APIs for multi-step tasks.
• Designing evaluations for AI systems; proficiency with AI coding assistants and agents.
• Influencing technical direction across teams, with excellent communication skills.

Bonus

• Early-stage product experience; designing and building GraphQL APIs; comfort working across the stack.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.