Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Vision AI

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. Toast powers restaurants of every size, from neighborhood favorites to the largest multi-unit brands in the industry. We're investing in Vision AI to help operators see more of what's happening in their restaurants and act on it, so they can run more efficiently, provide better service, and become even more profitable.

We're looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Vision AI to architect and build the platform behind these products. You'll have an outsized influence on how Vision AI is built and how it reaches restaurants across Toast. This is a highly hands-on role: you'll spend most of your time designing, building, and shipping, and you'll own the technical direction of the platform.

• →Deep engineering experience. 10+ years building software, including designing and shipping distributed systems and data pipelines in production at scale.
• →Backend and cloud expertise. Strong experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), event-driven systems (e.g. Pulsar or Kafka), storage, and APIs, in Kotlin, Java, or similar languages, plus comfort with Python.
• →Experience with ML systems and video. You don't need to be a model researcher, but you understand how models are trained, tuned, and served, and you've built and operated ML systems in production, including inference pipelines, evaluation, and model monitoring. You're also comfortable working with video (streams, codecs, tools like ffmpeg).
• →Pragmatic architecture. A track record of designing systems that fit the current stage, avoiding over-engineering while leaving room to grow.
• →Zero-to-one experience. Experience taking ambiguous ideas from prototype to production with real customers.
• →Hands-on keyboard. You still write significant production code and enjoy doing it.
• →AI-forward ways of working. Daily use of AI coding assistants and agent harnesses (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor), and experience building with LLM or vision-language model APIs.
• →Collaboration and communication. Ability to align engineers, product partners, and other orgs around technical decisions and explain tradeoffs clearly.

• You want a primarily cross-org or architecture-only role. This is a hands-on keyboard role. You'll spend most of your time building, with cross-org collaboration when the work requires it.
• You're more attached to the solution than the problem. We want someone obsessed with solving real problems for restaurant operators, who picks the simplest approach that solves them.
• You tend to build for scale before it's needed. We need someone who builds the right solution for where we are today and what customers are telling us, while keeping long-term direction in mind and knowing when to invest in it.
• You prefer established processes and tooling. This team moves fast and shapes its own ways of working. You'll help create the workflows, tools, and standards rather than inherit them.
• You're uncomfortable with ambiguity. The problems we take on and the best ways to solve them will keep evolving, and priorities will shift as we learn from customers.
• You'd rather be perfect than experiment. We move fast, test ideas with real restaurants, and accept that some of what we build will be thrown away once we learn what works.
• AI-assisted development isn't part of how you work. We expect AI tools to be central to how we design, build, and ship.

• Experience building computer vision, video analytics, or camera-based products.
• Experience with real-time video pipelines and streaming (e.g. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, GStreamer, WebRTC).
• Experience with connected device fleets: device provisioning and authentication, remote updates, and constrained networks.
• Experience building privacy-sensitive systems that handle video or personal data.
• Background in restaurant, retail, hospitality, drive-thru, or other operationally complex environments.

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.

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.

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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