About this role
Location: Boston Preferred
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.
The Kitchen Operations team owns one of Toast's most operationally critical and strategically exciting products: the Kitchen Display System (KDS). Deployed across tens of thousands of restaurants, Toast KDS is the connective tissue between front-of-house and back-of-house, routing tickets to the right prep stations, managing order sequencing, and helping kitchens run fast and accurately under pressure. KDS has strong growth across SMB, enterprise, and international segments.
Our vision is KDS in the vast majority of Toast kitchens within the next few years. Getting there means three things: supporting the most sophisticated enterprise kitchen workflows in the market, differentiating through kitchen data and AI-powered operational insights, and growing adoption among the restaurants that still run on paper tickets.
This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role at the intersection of restaurant operations, hardware-software product, and applied AI. You'll shape how hundreds of thousands of kitchen workers run their stations every day — and you'll be the one building the data and agent layer that lets kitchens run smarter, not just faster.
A day in the life (Responsibilities)
• Own and drive the KDS product strategy — enterprise workflow depth, data differentiation, SMB attach growth, and the agentic AI roadmap — connecting investments to Toast's kitchen adoption vision and near-term business outcomes including ARR growth, support ticket reduction, and enterprise retention.
• Define where agentic AI creates real value in the kitchen: proactive prep time adjustments based on real-time order load, automatic kitchen configuration changes tied to labor schedules or ordering channel mix, intelligent ticket routing and load balancing — and build the investment case to pursue the highest-leverage bets.
• Own KDS delivery end-to-end, working directly with large restaurant groups to translate complex, high-stakes workflow requirements into scalable product decisions that serve the whole market.
• Lead the KDS kitchen data strategy: define what kitchen efficiency insights should look like for operators at every scale, from API-first analytics for enterprise operators to actionable reporting for SMBs, and sequence the investments to unlock it.
• Shape and validate the business case for the next-generation KDS strategy — the long-horizon bets that drive future growth.
What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)
• Proven experience defining and owning product strategy for a complex, operationally critical product — bonus points if it spans hardware and software and/or have experience in food & beverage.
• Creative and strategic: you don't just optimize existing products — you identify the next meaningful bet, make the cas