Senior Backend Software Engineer

Job Title: Senior Backend Software Engineer

Location: Chennai – Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-Time
Department: Engineering

Bready* to make a change?

At Toast, we’re on a mission to help the restaurant community thrive through cutting-edge SaaS and fintech solutions. As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in architecting, building, and scaling the backend systems that power our platform. If you’re passionate about solving complex technical challenges, optimizing performance, and making a tangible impact in the restaurant industry, we’d love to have you on our team.

About This Roll* (Responsibilities)

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you will:

• Technical Execution:

  • Design, develop, and maintain high-performance, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs.

  • Optimize systems for performance (e.g., indexing strategies, latency analysis) and high availability.

  • Lead projects from discovery to deployment, ensuring alignment with business goals.

• Leadership & Collaboration:

  • Mentor junior engineers with measurable outcomes (e.g., skill development, project ownership).

  • Resolve team disagreements through collaborative decision-making (beyond PoCs) and articulate trade-offs.

  • Foster a culture of technical excellence through code reviews, best practices, and knowledge sharing.

• Strategic Impact:

  • Communicate the "why" behind technical decisions to stakeholders, linking them to business outcomes.

  • Balance feature delivery with tech debt, advocating for long-term system health.

  • Contribute to sprint planning and prioritization with a focus on ROI.

Do You Have the Right Ingredients*? (Requirements)

• Technical Skills:

  • 6+ years of backend development experience (Java/Kotlin, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kafka).

  • Expertise in microservices, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Docker/Kubernetes).

  • Proven ability to optimize performance (e.g., indexing, concurrency, gRPC).

• Leadership & Communication:

  • Demonstrated mentorship experience with tangible results.

  • Ability to align technical decisions with business goals and explain them clearly.

  • Experience resolving team conflicts through collaboration (not just PoCs).

• Strategic Mindset:

  • Understands trade-offs between speed and scalability/tech debt.

  • Exposure to sprint planning and prioritization frameworks.

Special Sauce* (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

While not required, these skills will make you stand out:

• Experience with restaurant or fintech systems, including payment processing or POS integrations.
• Familiarity with observability tools such as Datadog, Splunk, or Prometheus.
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Contributions to open-source projects or active involvement in technical communities.
• Experience with mentoring and leading engineering initiatives.

Why Join Toast?

At Toast, you'll build transformative products that power thousands of restaurants worldwide, directly impacting an essential industry. We invest in your growth with structured leadership development programs for engineers on the senior track, helping you expand both technical and strategic skills. Our Chennai team thrives in a collaborative hybrid work environment that balances flexibility with meaningful in-person connections. If you're ready to take your career to the next level while solving real-world challenges, we'd love to hear from you - apply today and let's build the future of restaurant technology together!