Senior Software Engineer, Vision AI

Toast

2d • $125,000 - $254,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Toast is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Vision AI to build the platform and customer-facing products that bring Vision AI to restaurant operators. The role owns major parts of the system end to end, from services that process video to features operators use, and contributes to how the Vision AI platform is designed and developed.

The engineer will build full-stack features and platform components, integrate vision and AI models into production products, and help create supporting evaluation and monitoring systems. The role also involves contributing to architecture and design decisions, collaborating across product, design, and engineering teams, and using AI coding tools and agent harnesses as a core part of development. The engineer is expected to uphold high standards for quality, testing, reliability, security, and privacy, and support the growth of other engineers through reviews and collaboration.

Toast describes its work environment as hybrid, with in-person collaboration and regional in-office expectations. The team moves quickly, works through ambiguity, experiments with real restaurants, and shapes its own workflows and standards.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience building and shipping production software, including customer-facing products.
• Strong backend experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), event-driven systems such as Pulsar or Kafka, storage, and APIs.
• Experience using Kotlin, Java, or similar programming languages.
• Experience building web front ends.
• Experience integrating AI or machine learning models, or LLM and vision-language model APIs, into production features, or demonstrated curiosity to deepen expertise alongside ML engineers.
• Pragmatic approach to engineering, selecting simple solutions that adequately solve problems and investing more when appropriate.
• Experience taking ambiguous ideas from prototype to production with real customers.
• Daily use of AI coding assistants and agent harnesses, such as Claude Code or Cursor.
• Ability to collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering partners and clearly explain tradeoffs.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building web front ends with React and TypeScript.
• Experience building computer vision, video analytics, or camera-based products.
• Experience with video streams, codecs, tools such as ffmpeg, or real-time video pipelines.
• Experience with ML systems, including inference pipelines, evaluation, or model monitoring.
• Experience with connected device fleets, including device provisioning and authentication, remote updates, and constrained networks.
• Experience building data-rich product experiences such as dashboards, analytics, or alerts.
• Experience building privacy-sensitive systems that handle video or personal data.
• Background in restaurant, retail, hospitality, drive-thru, or other operationally complex environments.

Responsibilities

• Build full-stack, customer-facing features that deliver vision-powered insights across Toast products, including backend APIs and user interfaces.
• Build and own platform components, including the video pipeline and services that process and analyze footage, with attention to security, reliability, and extensibility.
• Collaborate with machine learning engineers to integrate vision and AI models into production features and build supporting evaluation and monitoring capabilities.
• Contribute to technical architecture and design decisions.
• Partner with product, design, and other Toast teams on integrations and dependencies.
• Use AI coding tools and agent harnesses as part of designing, building, testing, and shipping, and share workflows that improve team productivity.
• Maintain high standards for quality, testing, reliability, security, and privacy in owned areas.
• Help other engineers grow through code reviews and collaboration.

Benefits

• Toast states that it offers benefits as part of its total rewards package; specific benefits are not listed in the posting.
• Cash compensation, including overtime and bonus or commissions if eligible, and equity are listed as total rewards components.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed