Director of Engineering, New Ventures

Toast Toast · Enterprise · Bangalore, India · R & D : Engineering : Shared

This role is for a Director of Engineering, New Ventures at Toast, focused on researching, developing, and scaling new product lines and business initiatives. The candidate will lead teams, own technical strategy, and drive innovation from inception to launch within a high-growth, ambiguous environment. While the company uses AI tools and encourages learning them, this role's core function is not building AI models but rather leading the development of new business ventures, which may leverage AI.

What you'd actually do

  1. Responsible for sourcing, developing, and scaling a new business line that can have a substantial impact on Toast’s long-term growth
  2. Collaborate with a product lead to perform market research and competitive analysis.
  3. Become the technology owner of your product, taking responsibility for the architecture, technical design, and development.
  4. Recruit highly talented intrapreneurs to the New Ventures program and mentor them to build new products and businesses.
  5. Define OKRs with the team while tracking progress against them regularly, and communicate plans and progress to cross-functional partners.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of engineering experience
  • 5+ years in senior leadership roles
  • Proven track record of building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
  • Strong ability to hire, develop, and lead high-performing teams
  • Experience operating in high-growth or early-stage environments
  • Experience building or leveraging developer productivity and delivery platforms
  • Understanding of how software development is evolving toward greater automation, faster iteration cycles, and programmatic control of delivery workflows
  • Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
  • Strong understanding of modern architectural patterns
  • Ability to design extensible systems and reusable abstractions
  • A hands-on mentality and willingness to remove obstacles for team members
  • Track record of proven leadership and accountability
  • meeting or exceeding objectives
  • taking products from inception to launch
  • Ability to estimate and deliver on the product vision and roadmap with confidence in feasibility, time, cost and impact
  • Strong attention to detail
  • Exceptional people skills
  • demonstrated experience building rapport and driving consensus
  • Successful past growing and fostering an inclusive culture of high-performing teams

Nice to have

  • Prior co-founder or early-stage experience

What the JD emphasized

  • building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
  • operating in high-growth or early-stage environments
  • solving complex, large-scale problems under ambiguity
  • building or leveraging developer productivity and delivery platforms
  • designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
  • design extensible systems and reusable abstractions
  • Track record of proven leadership and accountability
  • taking products from inception to launch