Staff Software Engineer, Finance Automation

<p>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.</p> <p>Toast is looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to join the Finance AI &amp; Automation team within the Office of the CFO. In this role, you will serve as a primary technical authority and builder, transforming working AI prototypes into enterprise-grade backend microservices, data pipelines, and internal tools that eliminate manual friction across the finance stack.</p> <p>Sitting on a central Engineering team, you will bridge the gap between rapid AI innovation and robust systems architecture. While your primary mastery lies in distributed backend systems and event-driven integrations, you will also own the lightweight frontend UI surfaces and operator tools that allow Finance teams to interact with these automations seamlessly.</p> <p><strong>A day in the life (Responsibilities)</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Hands-on Execution &amp; Leadership:</strong> Spend the majority of your time "hands-on-keyboard," architecting, coding, and operating high-performance backend services using Kotlin and AWS.</li> <li><strong>Productionize AI Workflows:</strong> Take working agentic prototypes built by Finance operators and turn them into scalable, monitored, and permissioned microservices with audit trails and automated error handling.</li> <li><strong>End-to-End Internal Tooling:</strong> Build pragmatic, full-stack operator tools—from backend APIs and pipelines down to the lightweight UI surfaces used daily by collections analysts and revenue accountants to run and monitor automations safely.</li> <li><strong>Integration &amp; Systems Architecture:</strong> Design resilient integrations across billing platforms, ERP systems, Salesforce, data warehouses, and internal Toast services using enterprise integration patterns.</li> <li><strong>Design for Enterprise Controls:</strong> Proactively engineer around SOX scope, PCI boundaries, and data access requirements alongside Security, Compliance, and Audit teams from day one.</li> <li><strong>Technical Ownership &amp; Strategic Handoffs:</strong> Own end-to-end technical strategy from high-level business problems down to build sequencing. Recognize when fixes belong in core Toast platforms, driving technical cases and clean handoffs rather than duplicating capabilities.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Backend-Focused with Pragmatic Full-Stack Reach</strong><strong>:</strong> Proven track record as a Staff (or senior-level lead) engineer with deep expertise in distributed backend systems, paired with the practical ability to ship frontend UI surfaces or admin portals when an internal tool requires it.</li> <li><strong>Production Kotlin &amp; AWS:</strong> Advanced hands-on experience shipping Kotlin (or strong JVM equivalent) services on AWS, with deep familiarity in cloud-native backend patterns.</li> <li><strong>Applied AI &amp; Systems Fluency:</strong> Practical experience productionizing LLM frameworks and agentic architectures (tool use, retrieval/RAG, evals, context management) paired with strong judgment on when an AI agent is required versus a traditional backend system or cron job.</li> <li><strong>Event-Driven &amp; Integration Architecture:</strong> Extensive experience with enterprise integration frameworks, message brokers, and distributed data stores—specifically Apache Camel, Apache Pulsar, DynamoDB, and Dropwizard (or direct equivalents).</li> <li><strong>Data Systems Depth:</strong> Advanced data engineering instincts across SQL, warehouse modeling, pipeline design, and managing data flow/consistency across relational and NoSQL storage systems.</li> <li><strong>Pragmatic Technical Strategy &amp; Communication:</strong> Ability to balance immediate high-impact automation with long-term platform scalability, accomp