
Senior Software Engineer
- Chennai, Tamil Nadu
- Permanent
- Full-time
At Toast, we empower the restaurant community to thrive through our innovative SaaS and financial technology solutions. As a Software Engineer (P3), you'll play a key role in designing and delivering scalable solutions, driving engineering excellence, and mentoring team members. If you're passionate about solving complex technical challenges, leading delivery with quality and urgency, and influencing outcomes across teams, we'd love to hear from you.About This Roll* (Responsibilities)As a P3 Software Engineer at Toast, you will:
- Execution & Delivery: Lead the end-to-end execution of complex stories and epics, ensuring sprint goals are consistently met. Anticipate blockers early, propose solutions, and drive tasks to completion with accountability.
- Estimation & Planning: Provide reliable estimates for complex work, break down ambiguous requirements into actionable stories, and guide the team during grooming and sprint planning.
- Code Quality & Technical Leadership: Write clean, maintainable, and performant code with strong architectural awareness. Perform thorough peer reviews, merge PRs responsibly, and set quality standards for the team.
- Collaboration & Communication: Act as a key point of contact for cross-team dependencies. Communicate progress, risks, and decisions proactively to stakeholders while fostering a collaborative and inclusive culture.
- Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing: Mentor junior engineers through pair programming, design discussions, and feedback. Facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions and contribute to building a learning culture.
- Quality Assurance & Release Readiness: Ensure features meet acceptance criteria, provide test data and handover notes for QA, and support release processes. Minimize QA rejections by validating work thoroughly.
- Incident & Monitoring Support: Respond to incidents, participate in root cause analysis, and ensure monitoring/logging is in place for production systems. Support hotfixes and escalations with urgency.
- Cross-Team Alignment: Collaborate with product, design, and other engineering teams to manage dependencies, align timelines, and drive shared outcomes.
- Continuous Improvement: Contribute to retrospectives, propose process improvements, and lead measurable improvements in velocity, quality, and collaboration.
- Ownership & Prioritization: Take ownership of high-severity issues and deliverables. Balance tactical needs (e.g., hotfixes, escalations, ad-hoc data requests) with long-term priorities.
- 5-8 years of experience in backend or full-stack development, with proven ability to deliver complex features independently.
- Strong expertise in one or more backend languages (Java, Kotlin, Python, Node.js) and solid knowledge of microservices, RESTful APIs, and event-driven systems.
- Deep understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases, schema design, and performance optimization.
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred), container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience leading technical designs, breaking down ambiguous requirements, and delivering high-quality solutions with minimal oversight.
- Proven track record in mentoring peers, driving code reviews, and influencing technical direction.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus) and production incident response practices.
- Strong communication skills, with ability to collaborate across teams and align on priorities in hybrid work environments.
- Demonstrated ownership, accountability, and urgency in balancing quality, timelines, and operational stability.
- Experience in restaurant or retail systems.
- Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.
- Familiarity with Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or other messaging systems.
- Exposure to capacity planning, Scrum of Scrums, or large-scale system design.