Software Engineer II, Developer Experience

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), New York (hybrid), San Francisco (hybrid) Bready* to make a change? 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. Because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people - and increasingly shaped by AI in both what we build and how we build - restaurants can trust that we'll deliver on their needs for today while investing in the experiences that will power their restaurant of the future. Developer Experience sits and builds the tools, platforms, and workflows that hundreds of Toast engineers rely on every day. We maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development, increasingly leveraging AI to enhance these workflows. You'll build and improve the tooling they use every day, measure where time is lost, and ship changes that empower Developers across Toast to ship faster and with more confidence. More and more of this work involves AI-assisted development, so you'll help shape how Toast engineers build software in the years ahead. About this roll* (Responsibilities) • Maintain and grow local development tools that accelerate engineers in the inner-loop of development. • Contribute to key internal development platform components like service templates and the developer portal. • Find and fix bottlenecks in the developer workflow, such as slow local builds, flaky tests, and painful setup steps, and use data to measure the impact of your changes. • Maintain and expand testing frameworks and core libraries used for developing web services. • Help integrate and roll out AI-assisted development tools, and help engineers across Toast adopt them effectively. • Partner directly with product engineering teams to understand their pain points, gather feedback, and turn it into improvements to the platform. • Operate the services you own in production, including monitoring, on-call participation, and incident follow-up. • Write clear documentation and take part in design and code reviews with teammates. Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements) • 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production software. • Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or TypeScript). • Experience building and maintaining core libraries and developer tooling. • Working knowledge of containers and cloud infrastructure (e.g. Docker, AWS). • Solid grounding in testing practices and in writing maintainable, well-tested code. • Comfort jumping into unfamiliar codebases and debugging problems across the stack. • Strong empathy for your users (fellow engineers) and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly. What will help you stand out: • Experience with the Backstage Developer Portal. • Familiarity with AI-augmented development workflows and tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar). • Experience managing 3rd party tools like LaunchDarkly, Wiremock Cloud, or Postman • Contributions to internal or open-source developer tools, CLIs, or IDE plugins. • Experience instrumenting developer metrics (e.g. DORA, build/test analytics) or observability tools like Datadog. 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