Staff Software Engineer - Traffic Engineering

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world. As a Staff Software Engineer on Traffic Engineering, you will design, build, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast, ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, deploy, and operate the traffic infrastructure that carries every request across Toast — from the public edge through cloud networking down to service-to-service traffic
• Lead complex, multi-team projects that improve how Toast services discover, route to, secure, and observe one another
• Own the reliability of critical traffic infrastructure end-to-end, from design through on-call response, post-incident learning, and long-term hardening
• Design solutions that anticipate future scale and product needs (multi-region, new protocols, evolving service-mesh patterns) while making explicit tradeoffs
• Partner with the team on cloud networking, edge routing (Cloudflare), DNS, and IaC-driven automation
• Act as a force multiplier: mentor engineers, improve developer ergonomics for service owners, and make the platform easier and safer to operate
• Lead through influence across multiple teams and reporting lines, setting technical direction and driving adoption of platform standards without direct authority
• Leverage cutting-edge AI tools to enhance your development workflow, improve velocity, and help pioneer new approaches to building — contributing to a culture of innovation and productivity across the team

Requirements:

• Experience shipping and operating mission-critical production services
• Led complex projects that span multiple teams and have presented technical plans to both engineering and non-engineering audiences
• Have a growth mindset with an emphasis on improving yourself, the engineers around you, and your functional area
• Deep, hands-on experience in Kotlin or another JVM language (Java, Scala)
• Built or operated a service mesh in production — Envoy, Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, or similar
• Managed cloud infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Hands-on experience with DNS and edge routing through a CDN such as Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Akamai, or Fastly
• Working knowledge of TLS — termination, mTLS, and certificate lifecycle management at scale
• Comfortable working across the networking stack and are comfortable digging into different network layers