About this role
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. Over 180,000 restaurant businesses run on Toast.
About the team
We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join our OLAP Platform team in Dublin. OLAP is the analytical data layer that powers real-time reporting, search and agentic data access for AI-driven products across Toast. We ingest events from across the business, index them into OpenSearch, and expose them to consumer teams through a federated GraphQL layer. One platform, many tenants, restaurant-critical latency and freshness.
The team is in a pivotal stretch of work: scaling the platform to support more domains and more consumers, keeping performance and cost in balance as it grows, and opening it up safely to the next wave of AI-driven products. This is platform engineering at real scale - the systems you build here are consumed by other engineering teams and, downstream, by the tens of thousands of restaurants that run on Toast.
What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)
• Strong backend engineering skills in Kotlin, Java, or another object-oriented language, with solid instincts around testing and code quality
• Experience working with large datasets, where correctness, freshness, and query performance all matter at the same time
• Comfort with document-based or columnar data stores (BigTable, DynamoDB or similar)
• A strong interest in core search engineering e.g. ranking algorithms, semantic search, natural language search etc
• Ability to work across team boundaries and pick up context quickly - OLAP touches almost every product area at Toast, and the work can be as much collaboration as execution
• The ability to break down a problem, understand what the consuming team actually needs, and ship a clean solution. Our users are other engineers, and the ergonomics of the platform matter
• Use AI tooling as a genuine part of your workflow, not an afterthought
What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)
• Experience designing platform APIs that other teams depend on - platform thinking, not just feature delivery
• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or a similar query engine at scale
• Familiarity with data pipelines or event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, or similar)
• Experience with federated GraphQL (ElasticGraph, Apollo Federation, or similar) and REST API design
• Exposure to Ruby, with the ability to navigate, understand, or modify existing source code.
Our Tech Stack
• A core of Java & Kotlin based backend services.
• OpenSearch as the core query engine with ElasticGraph on top for federated GraphQL
• Pulsar & Camel for message-based integrations.
• React SPAs leveraging Tailwind, GraphQL and Storybook.
• And many more technologies that help us build a top class platform.
**This is a hybrid role requiring in-office