The posting
Senior Software Engineer, Onboarding Location: Remote, US
About Toast
Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.
Are you bready* for a change?
A restaurant owner switching to Toast shows up with a pile of paperwork from their old POS, a bank account to verify, and an opening date that isn't moving. Getting them to running service on Toast is the job of the Onboarding & Activation team, and increasingly of the agents we build to do that work for them.
We've shipped our first agent, and it's the start of many. Onboarding is a broad set of deep problems (menus, payments, hardware, payroll, staff), each a candidate for an agent that acts across Toast's systems instead of answering questions about them. It's a company priority: lower cost to onboard, less support volume, higher NPS, and far better visibility into how each restaurant is set up. You'll define how these agents get built: what they're allowed to do, how they recover when something goes wrong, and when they hand off to a person.
Success means more than going live. It's how well the restaurant was set up, how ready they were for day one, and how much help they needed afterward. Those signals are real but delayed and noisy, and building evaluations that tell us an agent did the right thing, not just a plausible thing, before the restaurant opens is one of the harder problems here.
About this roll* (Responsibilities)
- Design and build AI agents that complete onboarding work for restaurants, from tool design and permissions through evaluation, guardrails, and production monitoring.
- Turn the Toast systems onboarding touches, including payments, payroll, hardware, menus, and appointments, into reliable tools agents can use to read state and take action.
- Own the onboarding backend and reshape it for agent-driven flows that aren't known in advance.
- Build evaluation and measurement so every launch is tied to real outcomes: setup quality, readiness to go live, and how much help restaurants need after launch.
- Ship full-stack changes in the restaurant-facing setup experience when the work calls for it.
- Partner with product, design, onboarding operations, and data science to turn onboarding problems into agents and product changes we can test and measure.
- Contribute to technical design and architecture, and help set engineering standards for AI-powered systems across the teams that contribute to onboarding.
- Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and by sharing how you build with AI.
Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements)
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems in Kotlin, Java, or another object-oriented language.
- Experience building on LLMs where the model takes real actions through tools, in production or in serious side projects, with a practical grasp of nondeterminism, evaluation, and cost.
- Proven ability to own outcomes end to end: design, launch, rollout monitoring, measurement, and iteration.
- A product-minded builder who forms a point of view on what to build, not just how, and works across PM, design, and operations rather than executing tickets.
- You use AI coding tools like Claude Code as a core part of how you work, and you've helped others get better with them.
Special sauce* (Nice to haves)
- Experience with customer onboarding, activation, growth, or workflow/task orchestration systems.
- Experience with experimentation or funnel analysis, and a working sense of when to believe a metric.
- Enough full-stack experience (React and TypeScript preferred) to ship front-end changes when needed.
- Experience with event-driven architectures.
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.
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 backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.
Apply today!
Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact [email protected].
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