Principal TA Systems Architect

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. At Toast, Talent Acquisition runs on its tools. Greenhouse, GoodTime, and BrightHire are where every requisition, interview, and hiring decision actually happens — and no single person owns them end-to-end today. That is this role. As a Principal TA Systems Architect, you will be the technical owner of the TA tech stack: the person who configures it, integrates it, secures it, measures it, and decides where it goes next. You will partner closely with the TA Operations who live in these systems every day, with the broader People Systems and People Analytics teams who own the HRIS and downstream data, and with IT, Security, Legal, and Procurement on access, privacy, and purchasing. You will own the vendor relationships — roadmap conversations, renewals, escalations — and hold our partners to a standard. This is an individual contributor role today with a clear path to building and leading a small team as the function scales. If you want to own a domain, be the deepest expert in the building on it, and eventually hire people to extend it, this is that job. A day in the life (Responsibilities) • Own the stack: Serve as system owner and top-tier administrator for Greenhouse, GoodTime, and BrightHire — configuration, permissions, workflows, approval chains, compliance settings, and release management. • Own the integration layer between TA systems and the rest of the People stack: HRIS, background check, assessments, sourcing, and offer tooling, including API-based integrations and middleware. • Run intake-to-resolution on system issues: triage, root-cause, fix, and close the loop with whoever reported it. • Hold the change management discipline the stack needs — sandbox testing, documented configuration decisions, release notes, and user communications. • Partner across the People organization and drive the roadmap: Work directly with recruiters, sourcers, coordinators, and TA leadership to find where the process actually breaks, and translate that into system solutions instead of more manual workarounds. • Partner with People Systems, People Analytics, IT, Security, and Legal so TA systems fit the broader architecture: clean data flows, sane access models, defensible privacy and records practices. • Build and own a multi-quarter TA systems roadmap, and make the case for what is worth doing and what is not. • Evaluate new tooling — including AI-enabled recruiting tools — with real rigor: pilot design, success criteria, security review, and an honest recommendation. • Manage the vendors: Own day-to-day vendor relationships and act as the escalation point for outages, defects, and support issues. • Run renewals and new purchases alongside Procurement and Finance: usage data, business case, and negotiation support. • Hold vendors accountable to roadmap commitments and service levels; represent us in customer advisory boards and beta programs. • Build and automate: Write the scripts, queries, and automations that eliminate manual work — data cleanup, bulk updates, custom reporting, alerting on integration failures. • Build and maintain TA reporting and dashboards, and be the person who can definitively answer whether a recruiting number is right. • Document the architecture, integrations, configuration decisions, and runbooks so the stack does not live in one person’s head. What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) • 5+ years in HR or TA systems, People Systems, or a closely adjacent systems role, including hands-on ownership of an ATS at scale. Greenhouse experience strongly preferred. • Proven experience with gathering business requirements, translating into technical solutions, and ultimately bringing solutions to life (project management, UAT, release management, and prod support). • Deep, current administrative expertise in at least one core recruiting platform, and a demonstrated ability to get to that depth quickly on new ones. • Real technical fluency: comfortable with REST APIs, webhooks, and JSON; experienced with iPaaS or middleware tooling (Workato, Tray, Merge, Zapier, or similar). • Experience integrating an ATS with an HRIS (Workday, UKG, or similar) and a working understanding of where recruiting data goes downstream and why it matters. • Proven vendor management experience: renewals, escalations, and holding a partner to their commitments. • Excellent partnership skills with non-technical stakeholders. You can sit with a recruiter, watch them work, and see the system problem underneath the complaint. • Practical knowledge of the compliance environment around recruiting data: EEOC and OFCCP requirements, GDPR/CCPA, data retention, and interview recording consent. Bonus Points (Nice-To-Haves) • Direct administrative experience with GoodTime and BrightHire. • Experience standing up, migrating, or consolidating an ATS. • Prior people management, or experience mentoring and leading a systems function. • Experience evaluating and deploying AI tooling inside a live recruiting workflow. • Familiarity with high-volume and field-based hiring models. What success looks like in your first year: • Recruiters trust the systems and stop building spreadsheets around them. • Adoption of existing/newly implemented TA tools (90%) • Integration failures are caught by monitoring, not by a recruiter noticing. • Every core TA system has a documented owner, configuration record, and roadmap. • Renewals are decided on usage and outcome data, not on inertia. AI at Toast At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired