Staff Software Engineer, Finance Automation

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 looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to join the Finance AI & Automation team within the Office of the CFO. In this role, you will serve as a primary technical authority and builder, transforming working AI prototypes into enterprise-grade backend microservices, data pipelines, and internal tools that eliminate manual friction across the finance stack.

Sitting on a central Engineering team, you will bridge the gap between rapid AI innovation and robust systems architecture. While your primary mastery lies in distributed backend systems and event-driven integrations, you will also own the lightweight frontend UI surfaces and operator tools that allow Finance teams to interact with these automations seamlessly.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Hands-on Execution & Leadership: Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting, coding, and operating high-performance backend services using Kotlin and AWS.
• Productionize AI Workflows: Take working agentic prototypes built by Finance operators and turn them into scalable, monitored, and permissioned microservices with audit trails and automated error handling.
• End-to-End Internal Tooling: Build pragmatic, full-stack operator tools—from backend APIs and pipelines down to the lightweight UI surfaces used daily by collections analysts and revenue accountants to run and monitor automations safely.
• Integration & Systems Architecture: Design resilient integrations across billing platforms, ERP systems, Salesforce, data warehouses, and internal Toast services using enterprise integration patterns.
• Design for Enterprise Controls: Proactively engineer around SOX scope, PCI boundaries, and data access requirements alongside Security, Compliance, and Audit teams from day one.
• Technical Ownership & Strategic Handoffs: Own end-to-end technical strategy from high-level business problems down to build sequencing. Recognize when fixes belong in core Toast platforms, driving technical cases and clean handoffs rather than duplicating capabilities. What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)
• Backend-Focused with Pragmatic Full-Stack Reach : Proven track record as a Staff (or senior-level lead) engineer with deep expertise in distributed backend systems, paired with the practical ability to ship frontend UI surfaces or admin portals when an internal tool requires it.
• Production Kotlin & AWS: Advanced hands-on experience shipping Kotlin (or strong JVM equivalent) services on AWS, with deep familiarity in cloud-native backend patterns.
• Applied AI & Systems Fluency: Practical experience productionizing LLM frameworks and agentic architectures (tool use, retrieval/RAG, evals, context management) paired with strong judgment on when an AI agent is required versus a traditional backend system or cron job.
• Event-Driven & Integration Architecture: Extensive experience with enterprise integration frameworks, message brokers, and distributed data stores—specifically Apache Camel, Apache Pulsar, DynamoDB, and Dropwizard (or direct equivalents).
• Data Systems Depth: Advanced data engineering instincts across SQL, warehouse modeling, pipeline design, and managing data flow/consistency across relational and NoSQL storage systems.
• Pragmatic Technical Strategy & Communication: Ability to balance immediate high-impact automation with long-term platform scalability, accompanied by exceptional technical writing that translates complex architectural trade-offs to executive stakeholders. What will help you stand out (Nonessentials/Nice to Haves)
• Extensive background in Fintech, revenue systems, automated reconciliation, or operating within strict SOX/PCI control environments.