Principal Software Engineer

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. Toast helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best : building the businesses they love. Toast connects employees, operations, and guests on a reliable, easy-to-use platform so restaurateurs can stay one step ahead of a rapidly evolving hospitality market.

We are hiring for the 'International Payments' team - the driving force behind Toast's global expansion. We architect and scale the core payment engine powering our growth in new markets around the world.

As a Principal-Engineer/Architect, you will spearhead technical strategy and architect scalable designs for Toast’s largest restaurant brands. Partnering with product, business & engineering stakeholders, you will define the technological roadmap empowering customers to unleash the full capability of Toast. You will collaborate with engineering leaders and cross-functional teams across the organization to execute robust, mission-critical solutions seamlessly integrated with external systems.

You will drive the evolution of our International Payments platform, expanding Toast’s global footprint with best-in-class customer-facing Fintech products and foundational capabilities.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

- Gain deep expertise in Toast’s payments ecosystem to enable reliable, seamless payment acceptance and processing across our fintech portfolio.

- Architect resilient, high-scale, mission-critical payment platform components.

- Design, build, deploy, and maintain highly resilient and scalable features across Toast’s International line-of-products.

- Lead complex initiatives that would span multiple teams & systems.

- Collaborate with stakeholders across the organization - including PMs, SEs, QA, and UX - to help your teams get stuff done and deliver solutions that maximize value.

- Drive high-quality team output and ensure that the team makes solid technical decisions.

- Serve as a steward of an exceptional culture, encompassing both technical excellence and people‑centric values.

- Champion best practices for SDLC & CICD life-cycles.

- Champion the use of AI tools and practices to accelerate development, improve team velocity, and pioneer new ways of building - setting the bar for what it means to be an AI-first engineering organization.

- Mentor & coach engineers within the Fintech organisation.

- Hire and develop new team members, helping build a diverse team that wins together.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

- Strong technologist with 12+ years experience defining and implementing high scale SaaS solutions.

- Have strong understanding & hands-on experience of building fault-tolerant, highly-scalable & secure distributed systems.

- Proficiency with sql/nosql databases, strong understanding of distributed datastores and knowledge of when to use what.

- Strong foundations in data structures & algorithms.

- Strong interpersonal skills and a proven track record of building partnerships across engineering, product, customer success, and other stakeholders.

- Experience shipping iterative value using agile or lean software delivery methods.

- Experience of tackling complex and ambiguous problems, communicate clearly with others to solve the problem, and share knowledge to help the whole team succeed

- Experience building payments & Fintech products, with at least 10+ years in the payments industry

Our Tech Stack

- Backend services which follow a microservice architecture written using Kotlin, Java and DropWizard

- Event driven messaging & streaming using Apache Pulsar & RabbitMQ.

- Apache Camel for implementing Enterprise Integration Pattern.

- React & ES6 based Frontend SPAs leveraging Tailwind, GraphQL and Storybook.

- DynamoDb & Postgres as core persistence