Staff Engineer, Cloud Security

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.

The Product & Platform Security team at Toast protects the cloud infrastructure and services that restaurants depend on every day. We are looking for a Staff Engineer, Cloud Security to expand the scope and coverage of our cloud security capabilities. You will join an existing cloud security team and take a role in setting direction for how Toast secures its cloud environments. This is a hands-on role with technical leadership responsibilities: you will build and operate security tooling and controls yourself, while also shaping strategy, mentoring teammates, and influencing the roadmaps of engineering teams across R&D.

Our footprint is primarily AWS. You will work closely with Platform and Infrastructure teams in R&D, and with Defense & Response and other Security Engineering teams within Trust & Security.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

- Own and operate our Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), including tuning, coverage, integrations, and turning findings into prioritized, actionable work for engineering teams.

- Lead cloud security posture management (CSPM) across our AWS organization and accounts, defining standards and measuring adherence over time.

- Drive identity and access management improvements, including least privilege, role and permission design, and reducing standing access.

- Secure our container environments, from image and workload security to cluster configuration and runtime protection.

- Build guardrails and secure defaults into infrastructure as code and deployment pipelines, so that teams get secure configurations by default rather than through review.

- Perform secure architecture reviews and threat modeling for new and existing cloud services and platform capabilities.

- Partner with our SOC on cloud detection coverage, logging, and investigation readiness.

- Run and improve cloud vulnerability and misconfiguration remediation programs, working with engineering owners to drive risk down.

- Participate in security incident response, including on-call coverage, and lead the cloud side of investigations and follow-up work.

- Set the multi-year direction for cloud security at Toast, and mentor and uplevel other engineers on the team.

- Build trusted relationships with Platform, Infrastructure, and product engineering leaders, and influence their priorities through data and clear risk communication.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

- 8+ years of experience in security engineering, infrastructure, or software engineering, with significant time focused on cloud security.

- Deep, hands-on experience securing AWS environments at scale, including IAM, Organizations, networking, logging, and core security services.

- Experience deploying and operating cloud security tooling, such as CNAPP or CSPM platforms (for example Orca, Wiz, or Upwind).

- Experience with container and Kubernetes security (for example EKS).

- Experience performing threat modeling and security architecture reviews for cloud services and platform capabilities.

- Experience responding to security incidents in cloud environments.

- Proficiency with infrastructure as code (for example Terraform) and in at least one programming language used for automation (for example Python or Go).

- A track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives and influencing engineering teams without direct authority.

- History of setting technical direction for a security domain, including a multi-year roadmap and the decisions behind it

- Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining risk and tradeoffs to engineers and leaders.

What will help you stand out (Nonessentials/Nice to Haves)

- Experience with GCP, Azure, or other cloud platforms.

- Experience with cloud detection engineering