About this role
This hybrid role is based in Dublin, Ireland (Full relocation provided).
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.
Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future.
An AI pod is Toast's AI-native engineering team, a focused pod of specialists who tackle complex, high-impact problems across Toast's product and platform landscape using AI-first approaches.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll work full-stack across ambitious, cross-cutting initiatives, bringing deep technical expertise and architectural judgment to some of the hardest problems at Toast.
A day in the life (Responsibilities)
• Lead full-stack design and delivery of AI-native solutions that address complex, cross-functional problems across Toast
• Drive technical architecture for pod initiatives, from backend services and APIs to frontend and developer-facing interfaces
• Build and integrate LLM-powered agents, tools, and workflows that bring AI capabilities directly into product and platform contexts
• Set and uphold engineering standards within the pod: code quality, system design, testing, and operational practices
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing
• Partner with stakeholders across Toast engineering to define problem scope, align on approach, and deliver outcomes
• Serve as a technical voice in cross-team architecture discussions, connecting pod work to broader Toast engineering patterns
What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)
• 10+ years of experience designing and delivering scalable software systems, with a strong full-stack background spanning backend services and frontend or developer-facing interfaces
• Demonstrated experience leading technical architecture for a platform, product, or engineering team
• Experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI platform infrastructure
• Familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and experience extending them through custom plugins, skills, or hooks
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks
• Strong prompt engineering skills and intuition for how LLM behavior responds to context and instructions
• Strong foundation in modern backend (Java, Kotlin, or similar) and frontend (TypeScript, React, or similar) technologies
• A bias towards action and comfort operating in ambiguous, rapidly evolving problem spaces
What will help you stand out
• Familiarity with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocols and multi-agent orchestration patterns
• Experience with machine learning