Director of Engineering, Platform and Ecosystem

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 Role

We are building a new innovation engine at Toast focused on creating entirely new capabilities and business lines that can drive long-term growth. These teams operate like seed-stage startups within Toast — moving quickly, testing ideas in the real world, and learning continuously.

Our focus is on developing products and platforms that help restaurants thrive in an increasingly digital and dynamic environment, while expanding the Toast consumer network in meaningful ways.

As part of this effort, Toast is establishing a new team in Bangalore dedicated to researching, building, and scaling a new generation of platform capabilities. This team will tackle complex, high-impact problems and explore new approaches to how software is built and delivered.

This is a rare opportunity to shape a new platform paradigm within a company that already operates at a meaningful scale.

In this role, you will be a founding engineering leader, helping define the direction of the platform and building the systems that enable it to grow and evolve over time.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Platform capabilities: Define and evolve reusable building blocks that represent core business functionality and can be combined in flexible ways across many use cases
• Machine-consumable interfaces: Design clear, structured interfaces that support reliable programmatic and automated interactions
• Guardrails and safety systems: Ensure that all platform usage adheres to security, compliance, and operational standards by design
• Execution environments: Build secure, scalable systems to run dynamic workloads safely and efficiently
• Validation and observability: Establish automated systems to test, monitor, and ensure correctness and performance across a wide range of use cases
• Ecosystem architecture: Design for extensibility and long-term growth, enabling the platform to support an expanding set of capabilities and integrations

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

Leadership & Experience

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in senior leadership roles (Director or equivalent)
• Proven track record of building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
• Experience leading 0→1 initiatives in high-ambiguity environments
• Strong ability to hire, develop, and lead high-performing teams

Platform & Systems Thinking

• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Strong understanding of modern architectural patterns (e.g., service-oriented, event-driven, cloud-native)
• Ability to design extensible systems and reusable abstractions, not just end-user features

Modern Development Paradigms

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development or intelligent automation systems
• Understanding of how software development is evolving toward more automated and programmatic workflows

Scalability, Reliability & Security

• Experience designing systems for high scale and high variability
• Strong understanding of multi-tenancy, isolation, and performance optimization
• Expertise in building systems with security, compliance, and reliability built in by design

Mindset & Operating Style

• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Strong product and systems thinking with a focus on enabling leverage at scale
• Bias toward action, experimentation, and continuous learning

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.