Principal Product Designer

About Toast 🍞

Our focus is on building the platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love. And because our technology is purpose-built for restaurants, by restaurant people, restaurants can trust that we’ll deliver on their needs for today while investing in experiences that will power their restaurant of the future. We build experiences that help make operating and growing a business and delighting customers easier and scalable. It’s why tens of thousands of businesses love Toast.

Toast IQ is our new AI assistant, designed to give restaurant operators smarter insights, deeper personalization, and the ability to take action across the Toast ecosystem. Building on the foundation of Toast IQ, we plan to test out new models of premium intelligence features, community-driven use cases, and automation tools that help operators save time, increase revenue, and run better businesses.

We’re entering an exciting phase of expanding this product to tens of thousands of businesses. Foundational to this expansion is experimenting with new tooling and AI models, launching and gating premium features, and driving adoption for our new product. That’s where you come in.

About this roll*:

As the Principal Product Designer for Toast IQ Core, you’ll lead design strategy and execution that will evolve the experience ( interaction design, design system and componentry) of Toast’s newest AI assistant product. Your work will shape how we evolve the assistant’s capabilities and footprint across web, mobile and hardware, from chat to agentic workflows, while driving clear customer value.

You’ll partner closely with product, engineering, data science, go-to-market, and third-party partners to define the future of intelligence at Toast. If you thrive in zero-to-one product design, care about how operators discover and use AI capabilities, and are excited about growth strategy, this role is for you.

This is a highly visible and hands-on individual contributor role where you will collaborate with cross-functional teams and work directly with conversational and service designers to create experiences that take full advantage of the breadth and depth of Toast’s platform.

The right ingredients* (Requirements)

• Leadership: Proven ability to lead high-impact design initiatives at a principal level.
• Focus: Lead the end-to-end design process for core UX/UI features within Toast’s AI ecosystem, including web and native mobile platforms. You’ll drive prototyping and experimentation for evolving AI features like memory and personalization, agentic workflows and actions.
• User-Centered Design: Deep understanding of emerging AI use cases and tooling, foundational user-centered design principles, usability, and accessibility standards.
• Pro-research: Proven ability and desire to conduct and coordinate data analysis, user research and usability testing to inform design decisions.
• Tools: Proficiency in emerging AI tools (Claude, Codex etc)  is essential, as well as design tools like Figma, Miro, and other collaborative design platforms.
• Partner Collaboration: Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams, including product managers, engineers, GTM, data scientists and other stakeholders to define design requirements and align on goals.

Mentorship: Drive strategic design initiatives and mentor junior designers, promoting best practices and fostering a culture of innovation and AI adoption.

Special Sauce* (Nonessential Skills/Nice to Haves)

• Restaurant Passion: First hand experience and enthusiasm for the restaurant industry and designing impactful solutions for its unique challenges is something we value highly
• Past Experiences: Experience and passion for designing for growth and  AI-driven experiences

Strong technical fluency: comfortable with APIs, data flows, and personalization algorithms, experience with LLMs, experimentation, A/B testing, personalization engines, or automation frameworks.

About You

You are a dynamic leader with proven impact in previous roles who is ready and willing to take on new challenges! You’re excited to join the remotely distributed group of product designers, user researchers, design ops leaders, and product managers that compose the Toast Design team. You embody the tenets that drive Toast’s Design practice:

1. You have a founder’s mentality: and exhibit ownership of outcomes over outputs. You own the quality and outcomes associated with full end to end experiences.
2. You lift others up: and recognize you don’t have to be a manager to engage and exhibit true leadership. You find formal ways to utilize your personal skill set to uplevel those around you.
3. You drive action through influence: and appreciate that building trusting and productive relationships with those around youis integral to driving action. You build strong relationships to enact influence throughout the entirety of the area of the business you work within.
4. You build strong perspectives: and guide yourself and your teams to make good decisions quickly and often. You collaboratively make well informed decisions with large scale impact across the area of the business you work within.
5. You raise the bar: and commit to continually improving the technical skills relevant to your role. You find large scale, creative methods to continually build your skill set.

Our Spread* of Total Rewards

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

*Bread puns encouraged but not required

AI at Toast

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.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

#LI-REMOTE

The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy.

Zone A

$190,000—$304,000 USD

Zone B

$165,000—$264,000 USD

Zone C

$149,000—$238,000 USD

How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences.

We Thrive Together

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast.

Apply today!

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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For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.