Senior Software Engineer - AI Pod

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

AI Pod is Toast's internal platform team for AI. We build the infrastructure, governance, and developer tooling that makes AI a reliable, scalable force multiplier across the entire product development lifecycle. Our products include the LLM Proxy, AI Key Management, Observability pipelines, the Claude Plugin Marketplace, and autonomous agents that participate directly in the software development lifecycle.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you'll be hands-on building the systems that other Toast engineers depend on every day: the LLM proxy, agentic workflows, and the plugin marketplace that brings AI-native development practices to teams across the company.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Design, build, and ship features across AI platform infrastructure, including the LLM proxy, AI key management, and observability pipelines
• Develop and extend autonomous agents that participate in the SDLC, such as the AI Review GitHub App and Developer Platform MCP integrations
• Build on and contribute to the internal plugin marketplace, developing plugins that encode Toast's architectural standards and quality practices into AI assistant behavior
• Implement MCP (Model Context Protocol) services and service templates that make it faster and easier for teams across Toast to build AI-powered workflows
• Write high-quality, well-tested code and participate in design and code reviews
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and platform teams to understand developer needs and translate them into reliable platform solutions
• Contribute to the team's adoption of agentic development practices and tooling
• Leverage cutting edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building - contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Bachelor’s Degree with relevant experience of 5+ years in designing and implementing scalable backend services
• Demonstrated experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI-assisted developer tooling
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and an interest in extending them through custom plugins, skills, or hooks
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks
• Working knowledge of prompt engineering and how LLM behavior responds to context and instructions
• Strong foundation in Java, Kotlin, or another object-oriented language
• Experience with distributed systems, REST APIs, and cloud-native infrastructure
• Strong customer empathy and a drive to make developers' lives better through reliable, well-designed platform solutions

What will help you stand out

• Familiarity with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocols and multi-agent orchestration patterns
• Experience with machine learning concepts, model evaluation, or ML infrastructure
• Experience building developer experience platforms, internal tooling, or API gateways
• Familiarity with observability tooling for AI/LLM systems (e.g., Langfuse, DataDog)

*** This is a hybrid role requiring in-office presence two days per week ***

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

#LI-Hybrid

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How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Apply today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

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For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.