Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Department: R & D : Cloud Service Infra : Platform Infrastructure

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.

Now, more than ever, the Toast team is committed to our customers. We’re taking steps to help restaurants navigate these unprecedented times with technology, resources, and community. Our focus is on building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. And because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people, restaurants can trust that we’ll deliver on their needs for today while investing in experiences that will power their restaurant of the future.

As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Toast, you will lead the architecture of systems powering our developer ecosystem and software delivery lifecycle. This includes platforms for code collaboration, service discovery, developer workflows, and CI/CD at scale.

Toast has invested in a strong foundation of developer tooling and platforms. This role is an opportunity to build on that foundation by connecting these systems into a unified intuitive experience, helping engineers move from ideation to production with speed, clarity, and confidence.

AI-assisted development is deeply embedded in engineering at Toast. The majority of engineers use AI tools daily, and AI agents participate in code review, build triage, and operational workflows. This is your chance to pioneer how the internal developer platform evolves, creating a future that empowers both humans and agents to achieve more.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Define and drive the architecture of the end-to-end developer experience across source control (GHES), developer portal (Backstage), engineering metadata, and CI/CD systems
• Optimize developer tooling to enhance engineering productivity, accelerate feedback loops, and reduce friction across the SDLC
• Own and evolve the developer portal as the central system for service discovery, documentation, and workflow orchestration
• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and release processes to increase reliability, security, and delivery speed
• Architect the developer platform to serve both human developers and AI agents, maintaining the guardrails that make both safe to operate at scale
• Use telemetry and insights to identify opportunities and drive measurable improvements in developer experience
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to advance shift-left methodologies and promote a fail-fast engineering culture
• Lead through influence across multiple teams and reporting lines, setting technical direction and driving adoption of platform standards without direct authority

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Deep software engineering background building platforms, developer tooling, or software delivery systems
• Experience working with systems like GitHub Enterprise, Backstage or similar portals, and CI/CD platforms at scale
• Strong understanding of developer workflows across the software development lifecycle
• Ability to design systems that span multiple tools, teams, and stages of the SDLC
• Track record of improving developer productivity or engineering effectiveness at scale
• Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of technical standards across teams you do not control
• Experience building or scaling internal developer platforms
• Familiarity with artifact management, dependency management, and release governance
• Experience using data and telemetry to improve engineering workflows
• Strong working expereince in languages such as Go, Java, and Kotlin

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.