Staff Software Engineer, Orders Pricing

About the role

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy. Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Orders Pricing team. The Orders Pricing team owns how every order is priced — the rules, discounts, taxes, and service charges that determine what a guest pays. Our pricing engine has to be exactly right, every time, across an immense scale of traffic and every surface an order touches, from the cloud to the point of sale. The pricing engine is a critical part of the company strategy as we expand into new verticals, encountering new complexities and pricing rules. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will deliver significant products and core capabilities across teams, serve as the domain expert for pricing, and make the engineers around you more effective. Why this team? Correctness at Scale: Pricing has to be right on every order, every time. Hard Problems: Discounts, taxes, and service charges stack into complex rules — we turn that complexity into a fast, reliable engine that has to keep evolving as Toast enters new verticals. Technical Leadership Across Teams: You’ll guide the technical direction for the pricing platform, deliver capabilities that many teams build on, and grow the next generation of technical leaders. About this roll* (Responsibilities) Align the technical vision and roadmap for the pricing engine with Toast’s strategy as we expand into new verticals Lead the design and delivery of significant products and core capabilities that span multiple teams Be the domain expert for pricing — how discounts, taxes, and service charges compose — and the go-to partner for every team whose product touches the price of an order Drive architectural decisions for correctness, performance, and scale; author and review technical designs within and beyond the team Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, grow future technical leaders, and raise the engineering bar across the team and the broader Orders organization Enhance the team’s effectiveness by identifying systemic gaps in tooling, testing, and delivery practices and leading the work to close them Set the standard for operational excellence — observability, alerting, incident response, and learning from incidents — and keep pricing highly available in production Partner with Product, QA, and engineering leadership to shape priorities, weigh tradeoffs, and turn ambiguous problems into clear, executable plans Champion effective use of AI-assisted development across the team Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements) 8+ years of back-end experience Track record of delivering significant products or core capabilities across multiple teams Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems, enterprise messaging systems, and microservices at scale Expertise with modern web standards and API technologies (e.g. REST, GraphQL), including schema design, evolution, and versioning across many consumers Experience owning business-critical services in production — leading incident response and driving long-term reliability improvements Strong experience with relational databases and alternative data stores, including data modeling and migrations at scale Proven ability to mentor engineers and multiply the effectiveness of a team Excellent written and verbal communication; able to build alignment across teams and explain complex tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences Nice to have: experience with pricing, tax, payments, or other correctness-critical commerce systems Our Tech Stack Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written in Kotlin and Java using DropWizard. We use AWS extensively, ranging from DynamoDB to RDS to Lambda. We store data in a set of sharded Postgres databases and utilize Apache Spark for large-scale data workloads including query and batch processing. For event-driven communication we rely on Pulsar along with some RabbitMQ clusters. Pricing also reaches onto the point of sale, so some contributions land in our Android POS application written in Java and Kotlin. Leverage cutting edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building - contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team. AI at Toast At Toast, one of our company values is that we’re hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture. Our Total Rewards Philosophy We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits. The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy. Zone A $193,000—$309,000 USD Zone B $168,000—$269,000 USD Zone C $151,000—$242,000 USD How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring Our Approach to Hybrid Working We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other. Apply today! Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected]. ---— For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.