Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience
$151k - $309k • Remote • Remote, US
Posted 5d ago
About the job
Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience team. This role will focus on setting the technical direction for how Toast engineers build software, identifying and solving high-leverage problems within the developer workflow. You will design and build solutions that impact hundreds of services and teams, with a particular focus on defining the future of AI-native developer experiences. The Developer Experience team builds the tools and platforms that Toast engineers use daily, including local development environments, build tooling, shared libraries, internal developer portals, and testing frameworks. Our goal is to empower every engineer at Toast to be faster, more independent, and more confident in their work.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and long-term architecture for local development, build tooling, shared libraries, and the developer portal.
- Oversee the architecture of testing frameworks and core libraries for web service development.
- Design, build, and ship high-leverage and cross-cutting platform components.
- Collaborate with Product Management to identify and address friction points in the developer workflow using data and feedback.
- Design self-service golden paths and paved roads to minimize friction for product teams.
- Drive technical alignment with AI, CICD, and Cloud Infrastructure teams for a cohesive developer journey.
- Partner with customer-facing teams to align developer platform solutions with business needs.
- Improve team standards through design reviews, mentorship, code-pairing, and engineer development.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Deep expertise in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Kotlin, Java, Go, TypeScript) and comfort with others.
- Strong experience with build systems and dependency management at scale (e.g., Gradle, Maven, npm), including managing cross-service migrations.
- Proven track record of leading multi-team technical initiatives from problem definition to adoption.
- Experience designing developer-facing products like CLIs, SDKs, shared libraries, testing frameworks, or portals with a focus on usability.
- Hands-on experience with and strong opinions on AI-assisted development tools and agentic development practices.
- Strong communication skills, including writing technical strategy documents and influencing without authority.
- Deep empathy for engineers as customers and a focus on measuring outcomes.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation and benefits programs
- Healthy lifestyle support
- Flexibility to meet changing needs