Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundations

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. AI Foundations is Toast's internal platform team for AI. We build the infrastructure, governance, and developer tooling that makes AI a reliable, scalable force multiplier across the entire product development lifecycle. Our products include the LLM Proxy, AI Key Management, Observability pipelines, the Claude Plugin Marketplace, and autonomous agents that participate directly in the software development lifecycle. As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll shape the foundation others build on: from the LLM Proxy that routes all internal AI traffic, to autonomous agents that participate directly in the software development lifecycle. If you want to work at the frontier of AI infrastructure and see your work amplify hundreds of engineers across a fast-growing company, this is the role. A day in the life (Responsibilities) Design, build, and ship core AI platform infrastructure, including the LLM proxy, AI key management, and observability pipelines powering Toast's internal AI ecosystem Architect and deliver autonomous agents that participate in the SDLC, including the AI Review GitHub App and Developer Platform MCP integrations Build on and help maintain the internal plugin marketplace, developing plugins that encode Toast's architectural standards, PR patterns, and quality practices directly into AI assistant behavior Lead technical design and implementation of MCP (Model Context Protocol) services and no-code service templates that accelerate AI-powered development across Toast Drive adoption of agentic development practices through tooling, internal evangelism, and hands-on enablement across engineering teams Mentor engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and pairing sessions Partner with product and platform teams to define and expand the AI Foundations roadmap What you'll need to thrive (Requirements) 8+ years of experience designing and implementing scalable backend services Strong foundation in Java, Kotlin, or another object-oriented language, with experience building scalable backend services Demonstrated experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI-assisted developer tooling Deep familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and the ability to extend them through custom plugins, skills, or hooks Hands-on experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or agentic frameworks Strong prompt engineering skills and intuition for how LLM behavior changes with context, instructions, and tool definitions Proven track record of technical leadership: influencing architecture decisions, setting quality standards, and mentoring peers Experience with distributed systems, API design, and cloud-native infrastructure Strong customer empathy and the ability to translate developer pain points into platform solutions What will help you stand out Familiarity with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocols and multi-agent orchestration patterns Experience with machine learning concepts, model evaluation, or ML infrastructure Experience building developer experience platforms, internal tooling, or API gateways Familiarity with observability tooling for AI/LLM systems (e.g., Langfuse, DataDog) This is a hybrid role with 2 days per week in the Bengaluru office 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 . How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret i