Staff Software Engineer - Traffic Engineering

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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on Traffic Engineering at Toast, you will design, build, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge, through cloud networking, down to service-to-service routing. The team owns the systems that move traffic at Toast: edge and CDN, DNS, cloud networking, and the service mesh and control plane that route requests between services.

Toast has invested in a strong foundation of networking and platform infrastructure. This role is an opportunity to build on that foundation by evolving how services connect, route, and secure traffic at scale — making the platform faster, safer, and easier for service owners to depend on.

AI-assisted development is deeply embedded in engineering at Toast. The majority of engineers use AI tools daily, and AI agents participate in code review, build triage, and operational workflows. This is your chance to shape how the team's traffic platform evolves, building systems that empower both humans and agents to operate with speed and confidence.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Design, build, deploy, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge through cloud networking down to service-to-service traffic
• Lead complex, multi-team projects that improve how Toast services discover, route to, secure, and observe one another
• Own the reliability of critical traffic infrastructure end-to-end, from design through on-call response, post-incident learning, and long-term hardening
• Design solutions that anticipate future scale and product needs (multi-region, new protocols, evolving service-mesh patterns) while making explicit tradeoffs
• Partner with the team on cloud networking, edge routing (Cloudflare), DNS, and IaC-driven automation
• Act as a force multiplier: mentor engineers, improve developer ergonomics for service owners, and make the platform easier and safer to operate
• Lead through influence across multiple teams and reporting lines, setting technical direction and driving adoption of platform standards without direct authority
• Leverage cutting-edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building — contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Experience shipping and operating mission-critical production services
• Led complex projects that span multiple teams and have presented technical plans to both engineering and non-engineering audiences
• Have a growth mindset with an emphasis on improving yourself, the engineers around you, and your functional area
• Deep, hands-on experience in Kotlin or another JVM language (Java, Scala)
• Built or operated a service mesh in production — Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, or similar
• Managed cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Hands-on experience with DNS and edge routing through a CDN such as Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Akamai, or Fastly
• Working knowledge of TLS — termination, mTLS, and certificate lifecycle management at scale
• Comfortable working across the networking stack and are comfortable digging into different network layers

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.

#LI-Remote

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$193,000—$309,000 USDZone B$168,000—$269,000 USDZone C$151,000—$242,000 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. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.

We Thrive Together

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 restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast.

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 candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

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For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.