Senior Principal Software Engineer - AI Pod

About Toast

Toast builds technology that helps restaurants and other local businesses operate more effectively in a digital-first environment. Its platform is designed specifically for the restaurant industry, supporting owners with running operations, growing revenue, connecting with guests, and keeping teams engaged. The company’s products are increasingly influenced by AI, both in what is built and in how engineering work is carried out.

The AI Pod is Toast’s AI-focused engineering group: a specialist team that uses AI-first methods to solve difficult, high-impact challenges across the company’s product and platform ecosystem.

Role Overview

In this senior principal and senior architect position, you will be among Toast’s most senior technical leaders. You will define the pod’s technical direction and architectural standards while remaining deeply involved in its most complex work. The role is expected to shape how AI-native engineering is practiced at Toast and help spread those approaches across the wider organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Set and evolve the architectural direction for the AI Pod, creating reusable AI-native engineering patterns that can scale across Toast.
• Contribute actively to company-wide technical strategy and architecture conversations as a trusted senior voice.
• Own the pod’s most complex initiatives from design through production, staying hands-on across the full lifecycle.
• Advance agentic development practices within the team and encourage broader adoption across the company.
• Collaborate with other senior principal engineers and technical leaders to strengthen Toast’s overall architecture.
• Coach and grow technical leadership within the pod and across other teams.
• Work with engineering leadership and product teams to turn strategic priorities into practical technical plans.

Requirements

• At least 12 years of experience designing and delivering highly scalable, mission-critical distributed systems.
• At least 10 years of experience building and running SaaS products, preferably on AWS.
• Proven ability to define architectural direction for an organization, business unit, or large-scale platform.
• Strong background in building, deploying, and operating LLM-powered agents and AI-native systems.
• At least 1 year of hands-on experience with modern AI coding agents and a strong commitment to agentic development workflows.
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool-use patterns, or related agent integration frameworks.
• Ability to shift comfortably between high-level architecture design and low-level system behavior under load.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, including the ability to engage effectively with executives.
• Preferred differentiators include experience leading a small team of 2 to 4 engineers, knowledge of A2A protocols and multi-agent orchestration, familiarity with ML concepts or ML infrastructure, and experience using observability tools for AI/LLM systems such as Langfuse or DataDog.

Additional Information

Toast emphasizes continuous learning and encourages teams to adopt new AI tools to improve speed, autonomy, and quality across engineering, product, sales, and support. The company says people who adapt well to change and use it to build better customer experiences tend to succeed there.

Toast’s compensation and benefits philosophy is built around competitive rewards, strong earning potential, and support for employee well-being and flexibility. More details are available on Toast’s benefits page.

During hiring, Toast says AI tools may be used by recruiters and interviewers for note-taking, summarization, and documentation, but people make all hiring decisions.

Toast follows a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration with flexibility for individual needs. In-office expectations vary by region, and the company asks candidates to check its locations information for more detail.

Toast states that diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to its culture and that it aims to create fair opportunities for all employees.

The company also says it is committed to providing an accessible and inclusive hiring process and will make reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need help accessing the application or interview process.

For roles in the United States, Massachusetts law prohibits requiring or administering a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment, and violations can result in criminal and civil penalties.

Who Can Apply

Applicants should be experienced senior engineering leaders with deep expertise in distributed systems, SaaS, AI-native engineering, and architectural leadership, especially those ready to work hands-on while guiding technical strategy.

Location

Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland.

Work Style

This role is based onsite.