Senior Principal Software Engineer, Machine Learning

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.

About the Team & Role:

The Machine Learning Platform team builds and operates the core infrastructure that powers AI and ML across Toast — the feature store, model hosting and serving, the experimentation platform, training pipelines, and the tooling ML engineers and data scientists rely on every day. Our work directly enables the models that drive personalization, forecasting, fraud detection, search, and the growing set of AI-powered experiences shipping to restaurants.

Toast is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to act as the technical leader on the ML Platform team, shaping the systems that will carry Toast's AI and ML capabilities into the next decade. The role involves driving architectural direction across the platform, delivering foundational infrastructure that other teams build on, and elevating fellow engineers. The ideal candidate is a domain expert with considerable ML platform experience, who partners with ML engineers, data scientists, product, and infrastructure leadership on high-leverage opportunities.

This position suits an engineer comfortable writing production code, leading technical design for distributed systems, and influencing organizational decisions about how Toast builds and deploys ML.

A day in the life (Responsibilities):

• Own technical direction of the ML Platform — feature store, model hosting and serving, experimentation, training infrastructure — driving architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, latency, and cost

• Lead design and delivery of large-scope platform initiatives from conception through production, coordinating across ML, data, and infrastructure teams

• Identify and resolve systemic technical challenges: online

Department: R & D : Foundations : AI