Staff Software Engineer

About the Job

Toast is building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and focus on what they do best: growing businesses they love. Our platform streamlines operations, increases revenue, and delivers outstanding guest experiences by combining point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support.

As a Toaster, you'll work on meaningful projects that shape the company's future. Join us as we empower the restaurant community to thrive.

Role Overview

Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Membership team in India.

In this role, you will be a senior IC technical leader for the Membership domain, responsible for shaping architecture and engineering direction for systems that power subscriptions, memberships, entitlements, and usage tracking across Toast's ecosystem.

This is a hands-on role with significant cross-team influence. You will partner closely with Product, UX, and engineering teams to design scalable platform systems that balance long-term architectural health with fast-moving product needs.

You will operate across multiple teams, define technical standards, and drive alignment on architecture, APIs, and system boundaries.

Key Responsibilities

1. Architecture & System Ownership

• Define and evolve the long-term architecture of the Membership platform.
• Design distributed systems for subscriptions, entitlements, and usage tracking.
• Own service boundaries, APIs, and data models across PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Design event-driven systems using Kafka, Pulsar, or similar technologies.
• Ensure correctness in distributed systems (idempotency, retries, consistency, failure).
• Identify architectural gaps, scalability risks, and performance bottlenecks; drive resolution.

2. Hands-on Engineering & Delivery

• Stay hands-on in designing and code reviewing backend services in Java/Kotlin.
• Build and evolve microservices deployed on AWS.
• Translate product requirements into scalable technical designs in collaboration with Product and UX.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and production readiness.
• Apply modern engineering practices including CI/CD, version control, and agile development.

3. Technical Leadership & Cross-Team Influence

• Lead architecture reviews, RFCs, and design discussions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for system design and engineering quality.
• Drive alignment on APIs, ownership boundaries, and technical standards.
• Communicate technical trade-offs clearly across engineering and product stakeholders.

4. Operational Excellence & Reliability

• Own reliability and health of production systems.
• Lead incident analysis and drive systemic improvements.
• Define and evolve observability standards (metrics, logs, tracing).
• Continuously reduce operational burden through better system design.

What You'll Need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 10+ years of experience building backend systems and APIs.
• Strong expertise in Java and/or Kotlin.
• Proven experience designing large-scale distributed systems and microservices.
• Deep understanding of system design trade-offs (scalability, consistency, latency, reliability).
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka, Pulsar, or similar).
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL and/or DynamoDB.
• Experience building cloud-native systems on AWS.
• Strong production systems experience, including monitoring, debugging, and incident response.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-evolving environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, ecommerce, or subscription/membership platforms.
• Experience with observability, resiliency, and large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern engineering practices.
• Experience building systems from scratch or in early-stage environments.
• Experience working across product-facing APIs and backend systems.

Our Tech Stack

Backend: Java, Kotlin, Dropwizard
Architecture: Microservices, Event-driven systems
Cloud: AWS (Lambda, S3, RDS, EC2)
Data: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Spark
Messaging: Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ
Frontend (adjacent): React, ES6