Senior Software Engineer, Voice AI

About this roll (Responsibilities)

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you'll take ownership of significant projects end-to-end: designing systems, driving execution across the team, and making the technical decisions that shape how the platform grows. You'll work closely with product, engineering, and stakeholders across Toast to turn ambiguous problems into reliable, scalable systems. Here’s what you’ll be doing:

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable backend services and applications supporting Toast's Voice AI platform
• Lead complex, cross-cutting projects from design through production, owning outcomes and driving alignment across stakeholders
• Shape the team's technical direction by making architectural decisions, defining patterns, and reducing complexity for the engineers around you
• Build and evolve integrations with AI platforms and internal Toast systems, making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability
• Design and implement observability, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks for AI-powered systems, using production data to understand and continuously improve system behavior
• Advocate for engineering quality and best practices, raising the bar for the team and the broader organization
• Mentor engineers at all levels through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance

Do you have the right ingredients? (Requirements)

• 5+ years of experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or Kotlin
• Basic familiarity with frontend development on small scale projects
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Experience shipping complex, mission-critical production services and owning them long-term
• Track record of leading multi-person projects end-to-end, from design through rollout
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and production reliability
• Experience building and reasoning about AI-powered systems, including nondeterminism, evaluation strategies, observability, and cost management
• Experience developing AI-integrated products or features, with a practical understanding of how to ship and iterate on systems that incorporate LLMs or other AI capabilities
• Strong cross-team communication and collaboration skills; able to influence direction without formal authority
• Actively uses AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) in day-to-day development
• Experience with voice or conversational AI platforms is a plus, but not required

Our Tech Stack

Our backend services follow a microservice architecture written in Kotlin and Java using DropWizard, running on AWS (DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda). We store data in sharded Postgres databases and have our own platform for user management, canary deployments, and load balancing. Our web front-end is built with React and ES6.