Staff Software Engineer - Retail

About Toast

Toast builds digital tools that help restaurants and local businesses run more effectively, grow revenue, connect with customers, and support their teams. The company is expanding beyond restaurants, and its Retail organization is rethinking how Toast supports modern retail operations.

About the Retail Experience Team

The Retail Experience (RXP) team is a high-impact group focused on making the product feel genuinely designed for retail businesses. Even though usage has increased, the current experience still does not fully match what retail operators expect. This team exists to close that gap by improving the full retail journey.

Its mission is to remove friction from onboarding through daily operations and to deliver connected, retail-first improvements across the broader Toast ecosystem. The team works across the Retail module and the platform to help customers succeed from day one and over the long term.

Role Overview

As a Staff Backend Engineer on RXP, you will shape the systems and services behind these experiences, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and customer needs. You will act as a technical leader and systems thinker across a wide range of initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver backend systems that are scalable, dependable, and tailored to retail-focused experiences across Toast’s platform.
• Find weaknesses in existing services and improve performance, data integrity, and overall system consistency across the retail workflow.
• Work closely with Product, Design, Frontend, and Platform partners to build smooth end-to-end customer experiences.
• Lead architecture conversations and help shape technical choices that support long-term retail goals.
• Create prototypes quickly, refine them using customer feedback, and adapt solutions based on real-world usage.
• Coach other engineers and help raise engineering quality, ownership, and technical rigor within the team.
• Strengthen system observability, reliability, and operational practices for backend services.
• Keep learning new technologies and approaches that improve system architecture and developer productivity.
• Use modern AI tools to speed up development, improve output quality, and support innovative ways of building software.

Requirements

• 8 to 10+ years of experience building and running production backend systems at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java, Kotlin, or comparable object-oriented programming languages.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, and data modeling.
• Strong grasp of architecture trade-offs such as scalability, consistency, latency, and fault tolerance.
• Experience creating and improving RESTful APIs and/or event-driven architectures.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across functions and deliver complete features end to end.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction beyond your own team.
• Commitment to building clean, maintainable, and observable systems.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment with a startup-style mindset.

Additional Information

Toast encourages learning and adoption of AI tools across teams, including Engineering, Product, Sales, and Support, to help employees build faster, work more independently, and improve quality.

The company offers a competitive total rewards package intended to support strong earnings potential and a healthy lifestyle, with flexibility for changing employee needs.

Toast uses AI tools in hiring for support tasks such as note-taking, summarization, and interview documentation. Final hiring decisions are always made by people.

The company follows a hybrid work model that combines in-person collaboration with flexibility for individual needs. In-office expectations vary by region.

Toast places diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of its culture and product approach, with a focus on authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility.

The hiring process is designed to be accessible and inclusive. Candidates who need reasonable accommodations for disabilities can request support during 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.

No application links, posted-on details, or applicant-count information were provided in the source.