Toast is a rapidly growing company that's revolutionizing how the restaurant industry does business by pairing technology with an extraordinary commitment to customer success. We help restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences through our platform that combines restaurant point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support. Join us as we empower the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong experience building and operating distributed systems to join the team that connects Toast's customers, services, and infrastructure. Every request to Toast depends on that connectivity, and you'll write software that improves the reliability and scalability of the systems behind it, from customer-facing traffic to service-to-service communication.

Traffic and the number of services at Toast are growing rapidly, so the team is scaling the infrastructure that connects them while keeping it dependable. This is an opportunity to apply your software engineering experience to network and traffic problems at scale. If you're excited to build the foundations for how Toast's services connect, working closely with teammates in the US, we'd love to hear from you.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate software that helps Toast's services connect and route traffic reliably.
• Improve the scalability, resilience, and observability of critical systems as Toast grows.
• Take end-to-end ownership of systems, making changes safer to roll out and failures easier to detect, diagnose, and resolve.
• Investigate production issues, participate in on-call, and turn what we learn into lasting improvements.
• Collaborate with engineers across Toast on projects that span services and infrastructure.
• Contribute to technical designs and raise team standards through thoughtful code reviews and technical discussions.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to other team members.
• Use AI tooling as a genuine part of your workflow, not an afterthought.

**This is a hybrid role requiring two days a week in the office

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 5+ years of back-end software engineering experience in Kotlin or another relevant language.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, including designing for reliability, diagnosing failures, and scaling services.
• Experience owning and operating production systems, with solid instincts around testing and code quality.
• A track record of tackling ambiguous, high-impact challenges and delivering scalable solutions.
• Curiosity about how traffic moves through large-scale systems, and the motivation to learn quickly and apply what you learn.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working across teams and time zones.

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Experience building platforms or infrastructure used by other engineering teams.
• Familiarity with network or traffic-management concepts such as routing, load balancing, DNS, or HTTP.
• Experience with AWS, infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), or cloud networking.
• Experience with service meshes (such as Envoy or Istio) or operating high-availability traffic systems.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend services writte