Engineering Lead, New Ventures

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), or New York (hybrid)

About Toast

Toast builds technology that helps food and beverage businesses run smoother, serve customers better, and grow with confidence. Our platform brings together the tools teams need to power daily operations—while turning complexity into clear, actionable insights. We're purpose-built for the pace of hospitality, and we're investing in new experiences that make great businesses easier to run at any scale.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

We're looking for an Engineering Lead to join our New Ventures team and help build one of Toast's newest products from 0 to 1. You will lead a tight-knit team of 4 highly experienced engineers as a true player/coach—where your primary focus is driving engineering velocity, hands-on problem solving, and outsized impact. You'll lead by example, helping the team discover new ways of working and building with the tools of the day to optimize for speed, customer impact, and the right shared norms.

You will partner closely with our Product Lead to drive weekly sprints. Beyond guiding the team, you will be deeply embedded in the product discovery process and work directly with our customers. We expect you to jump into the codebase to fix bugs, triage issues directly with users, and ensure we're delivering value at top speed without breaking what matters most.

In this role, you will:

• Lead, unblock, and collaborate with a team of 4 highly experienced senior engineers, fostering a culture of rapid iteration and technical excellence.
• Act as a player/coach, actively writing code, jumping in to fix bugs, and triaging customer issues to ensure a tight feedback loop.
• Partner directly with the Product Lead on weekly sprints to decide what we'll build each week, weighing technical tradeoffs together.
• Help the team pioneer new ways of working by integrating the tools of the day into our daily development processes.
• Establish shared norms, guardrails, and best practices that allow the team to move at top speed while maintaining high quality where it counts.
• Navigate the broader Toast ecosystem to unblock your team, leading technical collaboration with other engineering and platform groups when cross-team dependencies are needed to bring new capabilities to life.
• Stay exceptionally close to the customer, participating in feedback sessions and directly solving their pain points.
• Partner with your senior engineers to shape the technical strategy and architecture for a 0-to-1 product, guiding the team toward pragmatic decisions that balance speed-to-market with long-term viability.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)

• Proven 0-to-1 experience taking a product from concept to an initial MVP and beyond.
• A strong "player/coach" mentality with the technical depth to hold your own with very senior ICs, review designs/code, and contribute directly.
• Experience managing or leading small, high-leverage engineering teams, maximizing impact and autonomy in a lean environment rather than scaling headcount.
• Deep customer empathy and a track record of rolling up your sleeves to fix bugs or triage issues based on direct customer feedback.
• Demonstrated ability to build teams and products in new ways, constantly exploring how to leverage modern tools to ship faster and smarter.
• Experience defining shared engineering norms and guardrails that optimize for speed and impact while keeping processes lightweight.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, specifically with Product Leads, to weigh technical tradeoffs and define weekly priorities.
• You're self-directed, low ego, and thrive in an environment without perfect clarity.
• You've built with LLMs or shipped AI-powered product experiences.

Special sauce* (Nice to haves)

• Experience in operationally complex industries.
• Founder or early-startup experience, or time on an internal incubation or new ventures 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.