Staff Software Engineer (Developer Experience)
Posted
Summary
Sets technical direction for Toast's developer experience platform, staying hands-on to create build tooling, local development environments, shared libraries, and the developer portal across hundreds of services. Defines AI-native developer workflows, mentors engineers, and partners with product and infrastructure teams to reduce developer friction.
- We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for how Toast engineers build software
- You’ll pick the highest-leverage problems in the developer workflow, design solutions that work across hundreds of services and many teams, and stay hands-on while you build them
- AI is quickly changing what developer tooling can do, and you’ll help define what an AI-native developer experience looks like at Toast
- Set technical direction and long-term architecture across Developer Experience’s areas: local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal
- Oversee the architecture of the testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services
- Stay hands-on: design, build, and ship the highest leverage and most cross-cutting parts of the platform yourself
- Collaborate with Product using data and direct engineer feedback to find the biggest sources of friction in the developer workflow, and help turn them into a prioritized, measurable roadmap
- Design self-service golden paths and paved roads that let product teams create and evolve services with minimal friction or hand-holding
- Drive technical alignment with partner teams in areas like AI, CICD and Cloud Infrastructure so the end-to-end developer journey feels like one cohesive experience
- Partner with customer-facing teams to align developer platform solutions with customer and business needs
- Raise the bar across the team through design reviews, mentorship, and code-pairing, and by growing other engineers into technical leaders
Benefits
- Peer and company recognition programs
- Unlimited Vacation
- Sabbatical opportunity after five years
- Professional Development Reimbursement Program
- Commitment to Employee Wellness through resources such as a quarterly Wellness Stipend
- Various peer and company recognition programs
- 401(k) and matching
- Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage
- Mental Health Benefits
- Subsidized backup childcare
- Strong experience with build systems and dependency management at scale (e.g. Gradle, Maven, npm), including managing software migrations across hundreds of services
- Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript) and comfort working across several
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep empathy for engineers as customers, and a habit of measuring outcomes rather than shipping features
- A track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, from defining the problem through design, delivery, and adoption
- Strong communication skills, including writing clear technical strategy and design documents and influencing without authority
- Hands-on experience with, and strong opinions about, AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices
- Experience designing developer-facing products such as CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals, with a focus on usability and adoption
- Experience building or integrating LLM-powered developer tools, coding agents, or MCP servers
- Experience with internal developer portals or service catalogs (e.g. Backstage)
- Experience defining and instrumenting developer productivity metrics (e.g. DORA, SPACE, build and test analytics)
- Experience with containerized or cloud-based development environments (e.g. Dev Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS ECS)