Principal Product Manager - Catering & Events

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.

The Catering & Events team owns one of Toast's most operationally important and fast-evolving products. Catering & Events helps restaurants take catering orders, manage private events, and get paid, all connected to the Toast platform. Operators use it for everything from daily office lunch orders to large weddings and buyouts, and it handles the details that make or break a high-stakes day.

Our vision is for Catering & Events to be the go-to solution for every Toast restaurant that caters or hosts events, and to serve a growing range of use cases across Toast's customer base. Getting there means three things: making the product easier to adopt and love, building the depth that sophisticated event operators expect, and applying AI to take work off operators' plates.

This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role at the intersection of restaurant operations, B2B software, and applied AI. You will shape how thousands of operators run their biggest revenue days, and you will help define where Catering & Events goes next.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Own and drive the Catering & Events product strategy, connecting investments to Toast's vision and near-term business outcomes such as revenue growth, customer retention, and support ticket reduction.
• Lead initiatives that help more customers get started and succeed with the product, from onboarding and setup to everyday workflows.
• Expand the product to serve more use cases and customer types across Toast's customer base, working directly with customers to translate complex, high-stakes workflow requirements into product decisions that serve the whole market.
• Define where AI creates real value for catering and event operators, and build the investment case to pursue the highest-leverage bets.
• Partner with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success on packaging, positioning, and go-to-market to bring the product to the right customers in the right way.
• Shape and validate the business case for the next generation of Catering & Events, the long-horizon bets that drive future growth.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• Proven experience defining and owning product strategy for a complex, operationally critical product, with bonus points for experience in food and beverage, hospitality, events, or payments.
• Creative and strategic instincts. You identify the next meaningful bet, make the case for it, and drive it from zero to conviction.
• Curiosity and a point of view on AI and agentic product opportunities in operational environments. You do not need to have shipped an agent, but you should have a clear perspective on where autonomous action creates real value and where it creates real risk.
• A track record of working directly with customers, translating nuanced workflow requirements into product decisions that scale well beyond a single logo.
• Strong instincts for the SMB operator: you understand what it means to run a restaurant without a data analyst, an IT team, or a change management budget, and you can build for that reality.
• Executive presence to drive alignment without authority across Engineering, Design, Sales, Customer Success, and product leadership in a high-stakes, cross-functional environment.

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.