Director of Engineering, New Ventures

Toast is dedicated to building the platform that helps restaurants and local businesses thrive - empowering them to adapt, take control, and focus on what they do best: growing the businesses they love. Because our technology is purpose-built for their needs, customers trust us to deliver today while investing in the innovations that will power their future.

Toast is building out a New Ventures team with the goal of researching, developing, and eventually scaling a new generation of products and business lines that can have a substantial impact on Toast's long-term growth. In this unique role, the New Ventures Technology Lead will own a key initiative and be a key driver of long-term strategic decision making and innovation at the highest levels of the company. The ideal candidate knows both how to lead teams to build new technology businesses from scratch, and how to drive cross-functional alignment on innovation across large organizations.

About the Role

• Responsible for sourcing, developing, and scaling a new business line that can have a substantial impact on Toast's long-term growth
• Collaborate with a product lead to perform market research and competitive analysis.
• Become the technology owner of your product, taking responsibility for the architecture, technical design, and development.
• Recruit highly talented intrapreneurs to the New Ventures program and mentor them to build new products and businesses.
• Define OKRs with the team while tracking progress against them regularly, and communicate plans and progress to cross-functional partners.
• Work with the leadership to make decisions on funding, scaling, shutting down, and spinning off New Ventures initiatives
• Accountability for entire technology effort and leadership of a New Ventures product line
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and their ability to impact the success of executing on your product line.
• Manage, measure and report on the required effort, quality, and scope to develop New Ventures projects to the appropriate stakeholders
• Over time, build, lead, inspire and engage a high-performing entrepreneurial team focused on driving results

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in senior leadership roles
• Proven track record of building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
• Strong ability to hire, develop, and lead high-performing teams
• Experience operating in high-growth or early-stage environments, with a track record of solving complex, large-scale problems under ambiguity
• Experience building or leveraging developer productivity and delivery platforms (e.g., CI/CD, feature management, experimentation frameworks such as Harness)
• Understanding of how software development is evolving toward greater automation, faster iteration cycles, and programmatic control of delivery workflows
• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Strong understanding of modern architectural patterns (e.g., service-oriented, event-driven, cloud-native)
• Ability to design extensible systems and reusable abstractions, not just end-user features
• A hands-on mentality and willingness to remove obstacles for team members, while also creating connective tissue with centralized functions
• Track record of proven leadership and accountability, meeting or exceeding objectives, while taking products from inception to launch
• Ability to estimate and deliver on the product vision and roadmap with confidence in feasibility, time, cost and impact
• Strong attention to detail with ability to manage expectations at both an Executive and cross-functional level
• Exceptional people skills and demonstrated experience building rapport and driving consensus
• Successful past growing and fostering an inclusive culture of high-performing teams

Special Sauce* (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Prior co-founder or early-stage experience

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.