Principal Software Engineer, IQ Grow

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, the IQ Grow team is on a mission to scale new, high-impact go-to-market initiatives. By combining the cutting-edge innovation of AI agentic solutions with human-in-the-loop workflows and touchpoints, we are redefining how restaurants connect with their guests. Our goal is to deliver a truly personalized marketing experience that empowers Toast customers to build lasting relationships, drive engagement and grow their businesses. If you're excited about pioneering at the intersection of advanced AI and human-centered design to make a real-world impact, we’d love to have you on the team! You will be a key part of a high-impact, high-ownership engineering team solving complex challenges in a fast-moving product space. Your engineering leadership will be balancing technical excellence alongside a strong product mindset to solve for continuous growth within both the team and our product space. A day in the life (Responsibilities) Design, build and maintain high performing, flexible, and scalable solutions that help restaurants deliver a best-in-class guest experience : define and execute the technical architecture for AI agents within Marketing and Demand Generation domains, ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, and secure. Collaborate closely with Product, Design and Engineering stakeholders Maintain a strong hands-on presence, writing code, prototyping new patterns, and resolving complex technical bottlenecks under load. Collaborate with Principal and Senior Principal Engineers across Toast to align on best practices, agent patterns, and spec-driven development paradigms. Guide, mentor, and elevate engineers within the Team area, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning. Ship features end-to-end, from design through rollout, monitoring for success and iterating based on real-world use Be an awesome teammate who's all in on collaboration and collective success Leverage cutting edge AI tools to enhance you and your team’s development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building - contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team. Mentor less experienced engineers and up-level the team through design reviews, constructive feedback, and agent-assisted engineering practices What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) 10+ years of backend/full-stack experience, delivering products that drive impact Ability to read and integrate with frontend applications; showing curiosity to work across the stack when needed Strong enthusiasm for agentic development practices, LLM integration, and modern software paradigms. Effectively works with ambiguity, agile delivery, and shipping usable software incrementally Passionate about making users happy and seeing people use your product in the wild Strong on software development fundamentals — code quality, unit tests, clean code — and open to evolving your workflow with AI tooling Strong collaboration skills: you communicate clearly with engineers, product, and business stakeholders, and adapt technical detail to the audience Curiosity and a growth mindset: you seek feedback, embrace change, and want to grow toward broader ownership Balanced expertise: Ability to design high-level technical solutions on a whiteboard while remaining deeply connected to code-level execution and system performance. Effective communication: Ability to articulate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical peers and product leadership. Our Tech Stack A core of Java & Kotlin based backend services React SPAs leveraging Tailwind, GraphQL and Storybook. Android app built in Java & Kotlin running in the restaurant Claude Code and similar AI agentic development tools as part of daily engineering PostgreSQL and DynamoDB as core persistence And many more technologies that help us build a top class platform. **This is a hybrid role requiring in-office collaboration two days per week in our Dublin office .** 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 candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com . ------ 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.