Toast The Senior Software Engineer maintains and grows local development tools and platforms to accelerate engineers' workflows. This role involves integrating AI-assisted development tools and operating owned services in production.
Responsibilities
Maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development.
Contribute to key internal development platform components like service templates and the developer portal.
Find and fix bottlenecks in the developer workflow, such as slow local builds, flaky tests, and painful setup steps, and use data to measure the impact of your changes.
Maintain and expand testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services.
Help integrate and roll out AI-assisted development tools, and help engineers across Toast adopt them effectively.
Partner directly with product engineering teams to understand their pain points, gather feedback, and turn it into improvements to the platform.
Operate the services you own in production, including monitoring, on-call participation, and incident follow-up.
Write clear documentation and take part in design and code reviews with teammates.
2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production software.
Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript).
Qualification
Required
Experience building and maintaining core libraries and developer tooling.
Working knowledge of containers and cloud infrastructure (e.g. Docker, AWS).
Solid grounding in testing practices and in writing maintainable, well-tested code.
Comfort jumping into unfamiliar codebases and debugging problems across the stack.
Strong empathy for your users (fellow engineers) and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly.
Experience with the Backstage Developer Portal.
Familiarity with AI-augmented development workflows and tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar).
Experience managing 3rd party tools like LaunchDarkly, Wiremock Cloud, or Postman
Contributions to internal or open-source developer tools, CLIs, or IDE plugins.
Experience instrumenting developer metrics (e.g. DORA, build/test analytics) or observability tools like Datadog.
