Design Engineer, New Ventures

Location(s): US (remote), Boston (hybrid), or New York (hybrid)

 

About Toast

Toast builds technology that helps food and beverage businesses run smoother, serve customers better, and grow with confidence. Our platform brings together the tools teams need to power daily operations—while turning complexity into clear, actionable insights. We're purpose-built for the pace of hospitality, and we're investing in new experiences that make great businesses easier to run at any scale.

About this role* (responsibilities)

We're looking for a Design Engineer to join our New Ventures team—someone who lives at the intersection of design and code. You'll design, prototype, and ship the experiences that bring Toast's newest products to life, from fuzzy early concept through MVP and iteration. 

This is a hands-on building role. You think like a designer and build like an engineer, and you're expected to write production-quality front-end code—not just prototypes. Comfort across the full stack is a strong plus. Above all, you use AI tools to move fast, explore broadly, prototype convincingly, and continuously test ideas to create amazing user experiences.

We're looking for someone who is amazing at the craft of design and can turn that craft into real, shippable software. You think in terms of user flows, not screens. You draw on analogous problem spaces to find creative, unexpected ways to make an experience delightful. You're exceptionally strong at translating complexity—high volumes of data points, operational constraints, edge cases, and intricate rules—into UIs that feel intuitive and calm. And you take those designs all the way to working, maintainable front-end code.

In this role, you will:

• Own design and front-end engineering for one of Toast's new ventures—from fuzzy early concepts to shippable, high-quality production experiences.
• Write clean, maintainable front-end code, owning the quality of the experience end-to-end. We're scrappy and fast—we don't polish every pixel for its own sake—but the experience always needs to feel great, considered, and intentional where it counts.
• Use AI tools to iterate quickly: generate and compare concepts, accelerate exploration, and bring workflows to life through rapid prototyping and coding in hours, not days.
• Design information-dense experiences that are still highly scannable and decision-oriented—prioritizing hierarchy, progressive disclosure, and clear actions.
• Create prototypes that feel real—clickable, coded flows and interaction models that help product and engineering make decisions fast, and that get you from 90% to 100%.
• Make smart trade offs under constraints—move fast with MVP patterns, while sweating the details that matter most (hierarchy, states, error handling, accessibility, performance, and clarity).
• Run with a bias for action and testing: quickly validate assumptions via low-fi experiments, coded prototypes, usability testing, dogfooding, and iterative refinement.
• Operate autonomously: set your own plan, seek input when needed, and keep momentum without waiting for perfect clarity—while collaborating closely with a small team.
• Communicate clearly: tell the story of what you're building, why it matters, and what you learned—through working prototypes, artifacts, demos, and written narratives.

Do you have the right ingredients?* (requirements)

• You're equally comfortable designing and building and you ship real front-end code, not just mockups.
• Strong front-end engineering skills: you can build production-quality UI, and you care about maintainability, performance, and accessibility. (Fullstack experience is a strong plus.)
• Amazing at the craft of design: you think in user flows, borrow from analogous problem spaces to invent delightful solutions, and know instinctively where an experience needs to shine versus where scrappy is good enough.
• Demonstrated ability to move from ambiguity to a strong point of view, then turn that into tangible, coded UI flows quickly with modern tools.
• Demonstrated strength translating complex workflows and high volumes of inputs/data into interfaces that are simple, scannable, and decision-oriented.
• Strong product thinking: you can connect user needs, business outcomes, and feasibility into a cohesive experience.
• You think in systems and can build reusable, maintainable UI components.
• High comfort working in 0→1 environments where priorities shift, learning is the output, and "done" is an iteration—not a finish line.
• Ability to work as a team-of-one design engineer: self-directed, organized, and proactive about aligning stakeholders.
• You have a clear pattern of using AI tools to accelerate your work—exploration, iteration, prototyping, coding, critique, synthesis, or communication—and you can speak specifically about how you use them to ship better work faster.

Special sauce* (nice to haves)

• You've worked on early-stage products, internal incubations, or rapid experimentation teams.
• You've shipped polished products and have a portfolio (and ideally code) you can point to and say "I designed and built that."
• Fullstack range—you're comfortable owning backend, APIs, or data work in addition to the front end.
• You're excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms for how hospitality businesses run.
• Background in design or formal design training, alongside your engineering chops.

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.