Principal Engineer - Forward Deployment Engineering

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 is looking for a hands-on Forward Deployment Engineer to join the AI & Strategy Engineering team. In this role, you will be the primary architect of 0-to-1 solutions designed to revolutionize our GTM engine. This is not a 'maintenance' role; you will work on the front lines with our Sales, Marketing, and CS leaders to bridge the gap between frontier AI capabilities and high-impact, revenue-driving applications. You will be responsible for deconstructing complex business friction and rapidly engineering the intelligent systems that solve it.

Collaborating closely with a Senior Technical Leader, you will architect and ship production-grade AI systems—including autonomous agents and intelligent workflows—that transform fragmented, manual GTM processes into scalable, high-conversion engines

 

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Hands-on Execution: Design and Ship production grade agentic solutions tailored specifically for high-velocity GTM motions
• Rapid Prototyping: Transition from ambiguous business problems to functional AI Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) within 1–2 week sprint cycles
• Process Discovery: Embed directly with Sales, Service, and Marketing leaders to deconstruct high-friction manual workflows ripe for AI-driven transformation
• Strategic Integration: Architect the flow between LLMs and the GTM stack (Salesforce, Clay, Snowflake) with a "Golden Record" mindset to ensure data integrity at scale
• ROI Modeling: Translate technical metrics into business outcome driven metrics
• Architectural Resilience: Act as the domain expert for complex synchronization challenges, ensuring GTM systems are built for concurrency, scale, and reliability

Engineering Outcomes

• Accelerated Time to Value: Compress the window from "Contract Signed" to "Production AI" from months to weeks
• Technical De-Risking: Implement robust AI output guardrails using Eval Frameworks and "Human-in-the-Loop" (HITL) processes to meet company and compliance standards.
• Observability & Quality: Guarantee the reliability of the revenue engine by shipping every service with deep monitoring and automated alerting

 

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• GTM Systems Mastery: Expert in CRM APIs (Salesforce) and modern data tools (Clay, Nooks, etc.). You architect event-driven triggers, not just connect apps.
• Technical Complexity: Proven track record of building within complex enterprise software, such as custom quoting engines (CPQ) or deep CRM internals (Apex, LWC).
• Systems Architecture: Design event-driven, asynchronous architectures maintaining data integrity across fragmented systems.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field.

 

What will help you stand out (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Revenue Engineering Pedigree: Experience building SalesTech or FinTech products with measurable impact on ARR or conversion.
• AI Operationalization: Possessing AI knowledge, you collaborate with Data Engineering to productionize models within GTM workflows
• Automation First Mindset:You dislike manual data entry and are passionate about designing Agentic systems that eliminate "human-in-the-loop" friction.

 

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn.