Job description
Principal Software Engineer - AI Pod (Dublin, Ireland)
Company Overview
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.
Job Summary
This hybrid role is based in Dublin, Ireland (Full relocation provided). An AI pod is Toast's AI-native engineering team, a focused pod of specialists who tackle complex, high-impact problems across Toast's product and platform landscape using AI-first approaches. As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll work full-stack across ambitious, cross-cutting initiatives, bringing deep technical expertise and architectural judgment to some of the hardest problems at Toast.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead full-stack design and delivery of AI-native solutions that address complex, cross-functional problems across Toast
- Drive technical architecture for pod initiatives, from backend services and APIs to frontend and developer-facing interfaces
- Build and integrate LLM-powered agents, tools, and workflows that bring AI capabilities directly into product and platform contexts
- Set and uphold engineering standards within the pod: code quality, system design, testing, and operational practices
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing
- Partner with stakeholders across Toast engineering to define problem scope, align on approach, and deliver outcomes
- Serve as a technical voice in cross-team architecture discussions, connecting pod work to broader Toast engineering patterns
Requirements / Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience designing and delivering scalable software systems, with a strong full-stack background spanning backend services and frontend or developer-facing interfaces
- Demonstrated experience leading technical architecture for a platform, product, or engineering team
- Experience building, deploying, or operating LLM-powered agents or AI platform infrastructure
- Familiarity with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and experience extending them through custom plugins, skills, or hooks
- Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks
- Strong prompt engineering skills and intuition for how LLM behavior responds to context and instructions
- Strong foundation in modern backend (Java, Kotlin, or similar) and frontend (TypeScript, React, or similar) technologies
- A bias towards action and comfort operating in ambiguous, rapidly evolving problem spaces
Preferred Qualifications
- 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 or internal tooling
- Familiarity with observability tooling for AI/LLM systems (e.g., Langfuse, DataDog)
Location
Dublin, Ireland (Hybrid)
Employment Type
Full Time
Equal Opportunity Statement
At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.
