Software Engineer II, Developer Experience

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), New York (hybrid), San Francisco (hybrid) Bready* to make a change? 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. Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future. Developer Experience sits and builds the tools, platforms, and workflows that hundreds of Toast engineers rely on every day. We maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development, increasingly leveraging AI to enhance these workflows. You'll build and improve the tooling they use every day, measure where time is lost, and ship changes that empower Developers across Toast to ship faster and with more confidence. More and more of this work involves AI-assisted development, so you'll help shape how Toast engineers build software in the years ahead. About this roll* (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. Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements) • 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). • 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. What will help you stand out: • 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. 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 by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture. Our Total Rewards Philosophy We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits. The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy. Zone A $133,000—$213,000 USD Zone B $115,000—$184,000 USD Zone C $104,000—$166,000 USD How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring Our Approach to Hybrid Working We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of b