Senior software engineer, analytics & search

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. Over 180,000 restaurant businesses run on Toast.

About the team

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join our OLAP Platform team in Dublin. OLAP is the analytical data layer that powers real-time reporting, search and agentic data access for AI-driven products across Toast. We ingest events from across the business, index them into OpenSearch, and expose them to consumer teams through a federated GraphQL layer. One platform, many tenants, restaurant-critical latency and freshness.

The team is in a pivotal stretch of work: scaling the platform to support more domains and more consumers, keeping performance and cost in balance as it grows, and opening it up safely to the next wave of AI-driven products. This is platform engineering at real scale - the systems you build here are consumed by other engineering teams and, downstream, by the tens of thousands of restaurants that run on Toast.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Strong backend engineering skills in Kotlin, Java, or another object-oriented language, with solid instincts around testing and code quality
• Experience working with large datasets, where correctness, freshness, and query performance all matter at the same time
• Comfort with document-based or columnar data stores (BigTable, DynamoDB or similar)
• A strong interest in core search engineering e.g. ranking algorithms, semantic search, natural language search etc
• Ability to work across team boundaries and pick up context quickly - OLAP touches almost every product area at Toast, and the work can be as much collaboration as execution
• The ability to break down a problem, understand what the consuming team actually needs, and ship a clean solution. Our users are other engineers, and the ergonomics of the platform matter
• Use AI tooling as a genuine part of your workflow, not an afterthought

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Experience designing platform APIs that other teams depend on - platform thinking, not just feature delivery
• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or a similar query engine at scale
• Familiarity with data pipelines or event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pulsar, or similar)
• Experience with federated GraphQL (ElasticGraph, Apollo Federation, or similar) and REST API design
• Exposure to Ruby, with the ability to navigate, understand, or modify existing source code.

Our Tech Stack

A core of Java & Kotlin based backend services.
OpenSearch as the core query engine with ElasticGraph on top for federated GraphQL
Pulsar & Camel for message-based integrations.
React SPAs leveraging Tailwind, GraphQL and Storybook.
And many more technologies that help us build a top class platform.

This is a hybrid role requiring in-office collaboration two days per week in our Dublin 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. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in-office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Apply today!

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com.

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