About this role
About the Job
Toast is building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and focus on what they do best: growing businesses they love. Our platform streamlines operations, increases revenue, and delivers outstanding guest experiences by combining point of sale, team management, guest-facing technology, and award-winning customer support.
As a Toaster, you’ll work on meaningful projects that shape the company’s future. Join us as we empower the restaurant community to thrive.
Role Overview
Toast is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Membership team in India.
In this role, you will be a senior IC technical leader for the Membership domain, responsible for shaping architecture and engineering direction for systems that power subscriptions, memberships, entitlements, and usage tracking across Toast’s ecosystem.
This is a hands-on role with significant cross-team influence. You will partner closely with Product, UX, and engineering teams to design scalable platform systems that balance long-term architectural health with fast-moving product needs.
You will operate across multiple teams, define technical standards, and drive alignment on architecture, APIs, and system boundaries.
Key Responsibilities
1. Architecture & System Ownership
• Define and evolve the long-term architecture of the Membership platform.
• Design distributed systems for subscriptions, entitlements, and usage tracking.
• Own service boundaries, APIs, and data models across PostgreSQL and DynamoDB.
• Design event-driven systems using Kafka, Pulsar, or similar technologies.
• Ensure correctness in distributed systems (idempotency, retries, consistency, failure).
• Identify architectural gaps, scalability risks, and performance bottlenecks; drive resolution.
2. Hands-on Engineering & Delivery
• Stay hands-on in designing and code reviewing backend services in Java/Kotlin.
• Build and evolve microservices deployed on AWS.
• Translate product requirements into scalable technical designs in collaboration with Product and UX.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and production readiness.
• Apply modern engineering practices including CI/CD, version control, and agile development.
3. Technical Leadership & Cross-Team Influence
• Lead architecture reviews, RFCs, and design discussions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for system design and engineering quality.
• Drive alignment on APIs, ownership boundaries, and technical standards.
• Communicate technical trade-offs clearly across engineering and product stakeholders.
4. Operational Excellence & Reliability
• Own reliability and health of production systems.
• Lead incident analysis and drive systemic improvements.
• Define and evolve observability standards (metrics, logs, tracing).
• Continuously reduce operational burden through better system design.
What You’ll Need
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related techn