hybrid
Senior Principal Software Engineer, Senior Architect, AI Pod
Senior Principal Software Engineer, Senior Architect, AI Pod
As a Senior Principal Software Engineer and Senior Architect in the AI Pod, you will be a top technologist at Toast, defining the technical vision and architectural direction for AI-native engineering. You will lead complex, high-impact initiatives, evolve agentic development practices, and mentor technical leadership across the organization while remaining hands-on.
About the role
About the Role
As Senior Principal Software Engineer and Senior Architect, you will be one of the most senior technologists at Toast, setting the technical vision and architectural direction for the pod while remaining hands-on in its most ambitious work. You'll define how AI-native engineering is done at Toast and spread those patterns across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Develop and drive the architectural vision for AI Pod, establishing patterns for AI-native development that scale across Toast engineering
- Be an active participant and authoritative technical voice in cross-organizational strategy and architecture discussions
- Lead the pod's most complex, high-impact initiatives from design through production — staying hands-on throughout
- Evolve agentic development practices within the pod and champion their adoption across Toast
- Work closely with other Senior Principal Engineers and technical leaders across Toast to advance the overall architecture
- Mentor and develop technical leadership within the pod and across teams
- Partner with engineering leadership and product to translate strategic goals into executable technical plans
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience designing and building highly scalable, mission-critical distributed software systems
- 10+ years of experience building and operating SaaS products, ideally AWS-hosted
- Demonstrated ability to drive architectural vision for a company, line of business, or highly scalable platform
- Deep experience building, deploying, and operating LLM-powered agents and AI-native systems
- 1+ years of hands-on experience using the latest AI coding agents with a strong desire to go all-in on agentic development practices
- Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool use patterns, or similar agentic integration frameworks
- Ability to move fluidly between whiteboard architecture and understanding the ebb and flow of code under load
- Ability and desire to communicate and influence at the executive level
What will make you stand out
- Experience managing or leading a small engineering team (2-4 engineers)
- Familiarity with A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocols and multi-agent orchestration patterns
- Experience with machine learning concepts, model evaluation, or ML infrastructure
- Familiarity with observability tooling for AI/LLM systems (e.g., Langfuse, DataDog)