Principal Data Engineer

 

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.

 

About Toast

At Toast, we're building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and thrive. The Customer Success (CS) organization plays a pivotal role in helping customers get the most out of our products and we're transforming our data capabilities to drive a new era of proactive, data-informed customer engagement. 

The CS Data & Analytics team is at the center of this transformation, building the data infrastructure that makes proactive, data-informed customer engagement possible at scale for ~150,000 restaurant locations.

 

Role Overview

You'll be a founding member of a newly chartered data engineering function within Customer Success with a direct hand in shaping the architecture, tooling, domain model, and team culture from day one. This is a rare opportunity to build something from greenfield, with visibility to VP and senior CS leadership.

As a Data Engineer on the Customer Success Data & Analytics team, you’ll design, build, and scale the data platforms and pipelines that power insights across our Customer Success organization. Reporting to the Director of Data Infrastructure & Engineering, you’ll work closely with Data Infrastructure, Analytics, Engineering, and Product teams to ensure high-quality, reliable data is accessible and actionable.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on delivering production-grade, scalable, and reliable data systems that support analytics, reporting, and operational decision-making across Customer Success.

 

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, production-ready data pipelines (batch and real-time) for Customer Success using modern data technologies.
• Develop and evolve data models and schemas that enable reporting, analytics, and machine learning across Customer Success functions.
• Partner with CS operations leaders across care, workforce, and CX to translate business requirements into pipeline and infrastructure priorities, ensuring data work is directly connected to customer retention and operational outcomes.
• Ensure data quality, observability, lineage, and governance are built into every data workflow.
• Implement best practices for cost-efficient, performant cloud-based data infrastructure.
• Contribute to data platform tooling and frameworks that support self-service analytics and reusability across teams.
• Actively monitor and optimize data workflows for reliability, scale, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to define and track key metrics and ensure consistent data definitions.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and technical architecture planning to continually raise engineering standards.
• Build and maintain semantic and metrics layer foundations (e.g., dbt metrics, Snowflake semantic layer) that enable consistent, reusable definitions of CS KPIs across reporting and analytics surfaces.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of the CS data domain model including Customer 360, omnichannel interaction data, case management, and agent performance in close partnership with cross-functional stakeholders.
  
  

Governance & Standards

Partner with Toast's Business, Technology & Transformation (BTT) organization to establish data governance practices, security policies, and architecture standards that will serve as the foundation for CS data infrastructure. As a founding team member, you'll help define the norms, not just follow them.

• Ensure data pipelines, storage, and access patterns adhere to BTT data standards, security policies, and compliance requirements.
• Partner with BTT governance forums to align on design patterns, data architecture decisions, and SLA expectations.
• Maintain documentation and metadata for all data assets in accordance with established governance processes.
  
  

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)