Staff Software Engineer, Voice AI Platform

Toast

5d•$151,000 - $309,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Toast is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Voice AI Team. The mission of the Voice AI Team is to build and operate the voice platform that powers Toast and to ship novel applications on top of it that create real value across Toast's customer base. This is a greenfield space where the platform and its use cases are being defined together, and the work done here will be foundational to how Toast uses voice AI for years to come. As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you will take ownership of significant projects end-to-end: designing systems, driving execution across the team, and making the technical decisions that shape how the platform grows. You will work closely with product, engineering, and stakeholders across Toast to turn ambiguous problems into reliable, scalable systems.

Requirements

8+ years of experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or Kotlin
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
Experience developing AI-integrated products or features, with a practical understanding of how to ship and iterate on systems that incorporate LLMs or other AI capabilities
Experience building and reasoning about AI-powered systems, including nondeterminism, evaluation strategies, observability, and cost management
Experience shipping complex, mission-critical production services and owning them long-term
Track record of leading multi-person and multi-team projects end-to-end, from design through rollout
Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and production reliability
Basic familiarity with frontend development
Strong cross-team communication and collaboration skills; able to influence direction without formal authority both within your team and across the broader organization
Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) in day-to-day development and have caused others to become more proficient with AI coding tools

Nice To Haves

Experience with voice or conversational AI platforms is a plus, but not required

Responsibilities

Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable backend services, applications, and core platform components supporting Toast's Voice AI platform used across teams
Conceive and lead complex, cross-cutting projects from design through production, owning outcomes and driving alignment across stakeholders and across a broad range of stakeholders
Shape the technical direction on your team and beyond by making architectural decisions, defining patterns, and reducing complexity for the engineers and teams that depend on your work
Build and evolve integrations with AI platforms and internal Toast systems, making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability
Establish and implement patterns for observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for AI-powered systems, using production data to understand and continuously improve system behavior
Set and hold the bar for engineering quality and best practices through standards, patterns, and written guidance that others naturally adopt, raising the bar for the team and the broader organization
Mentor engineers at all levels through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance