How to Apply to Toast

Key Takeaways

Study Toast's product suite in detail before applying — explore toasttab.com, read case studies, and if possible visit a restaurant that uses Toast to observe the technology in action, then reference specific product knowledge in your application and interviews
Tailor your resume with exact keywords from the Toast job posting you're targeting, ensuring Greenhouse's parsing and recruiter keyword searches surface your application among the hundreds Toast receives for popular roles
Prepare a compelling, specific answer to 'Why Toast?' that connects your personal experience — whether you've worked in restaurants, frequented local spots, or are passionate about small business technology — to the company's mission
For Territory Account Executive roles, research the restaurant landscape in your specific territory and come prepared to discuss how you'd build pipeline among local restaurant operators, demonstrating both market knowledge and hustle
For engineering roles, practice system design scenarios relevant to Toast's domain — payment processing flows, order management architectures, real-time kitchen display logic — to show you can think in terms of the problems Toast actually solves
Apply to no more than two closely aligned roles at once, as Greenhouse shows recruiters your full application history and a focused approach signals genuine interest rather than a scattershot job search
Follow up thoughtfully after each interview stage by referencing specific conversation topics and reaffirming your enthusiasm for both the role and Toast's restaurant community mission

About Toast

Toast is a cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform purpose-built for the restaurant industry. From point-of-sale systems and payment processing to payroll, team management, and online ordering, Toast equips restaurants of all sizes — from single-location cafés to multi-unit enterprises — with the tools to run and grow their businesses. Publicly traded on the NYSE (TOST) and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Toast has grown into one of the most prominent restaurant technology companies in the United States, serving tens of thousands of restaurant locations nationwide. What makes Toast distinct is its singular industry focus. Unlike horizontal SaaS platforms that serve every vertical, Toast lives and breathes restaurants. This means every engineer, salesperson, and product manager is working toward the same mission: empowering the restaurant community to delight guests, do what they love, and thrive. The company culture reflects this food-industry passion — many employees come from restaurant backgrounds or develop deep empathy for the operators they serve. Toast's culture is commonly described as high-energy, collaborative, and mission-driven, blending startup intensity with the structure of a maturing public company. The company values transparency, ownership, and customer obsession, and employees frequently cite the strength of their teams and the tangible impact of their work as reasons they stay. With approximately 270 open roles spanning software engineering, sales, corporate strategy, and quality assurance, Toast is actively scaling across both its Boston headquarters and a growing network of field-based and hybrid positions across the country. For professionals who want their work to directly impact a beloved industry, Toast offers a uniquely compelling opportunity.

Application Process

Explore Open Roles on Toast's Careers Page
Start at careers.toasttab.com, where Toast lists all active positions organized by department, location, and role type. With roughly 270 open roles at any time, you'll find positions in Engineering, Sales, Product, Finance, and more. Pay close attention to the location requirements — Toast hires for a mix of Boston-based, remote, hybrid, and territory-specific field roles (especially in sales), so confirm you match the geographic requirements before applying.
Submit Your Application Through Greenhouse
Toast uses Greenhouse as its applicant tracking system, so you'll complete your application through a Greenhouse-powered portal. You'll upload your resume, provide contact details, and in many cases answer role-specific screening questions. Some roles — particularly Territory Account Executive positions — may ask about your familiarity with specific markets, restaurant industry experience, or willingness to travel within a defined territory.
Initial Recruiter Screen
If your application passes the initial review, a Toast recruiter will typically reach out to schedule a 20-to-30-minute phone or video screen. This conversation commonly covers your background, interest in Toast specifically, understanding of the restaurant technology space, and logistical details like compensation expectations and start date availability. Demonstrating genuine enthusiasm for Toast's mission and the restaurant industry can set you apart at this stage.
Hiring Manager Interview
Following a successful recruiter screen, you'll typically meet with the hiring manager for a deeper conversation about your skills, experience, and how you'd contribute to the team. For engineering roles, this may involve preliminary technical discussion. For sales roles like Territory Account Executive, expect scenario-based questions about pipeline management, territory planning, and restaurant operator pain points. This interview often determines whether you advance to the full interview loop.
Technical or Functional Assessment
Many roles at Toast include a skills-based assessment. Software engineers commonly complete a coding challenge or take-home assignment followed by a live pair-programming or system design session. QA engineers may face test case design exercises. Sales candidates often participate in a mock pitch or discovery call, sometimes role-playing a conversation with a restaurant owner evaluating Toast's platform. Corporate roles like Corporate Development Deal Lead may involve a case study or financial modeling exercise.
Cross-Functional Interview Panel (Onsite or Virtual)
Toast's final round typically involves meeting with multiple team members across a half-day or series of back-to-back interviews. You'll commonly speak with potential peers, cross-functional partners, and sometimes a skip-level leader. These conversations assess both technical depth and cultural alignment — Toast places real weight on collaboration, customer empathy, and ownership mentality. Virtual onsites are common for remote and field-based roles.
Offer, Background Check, and Onboarding
After a successful final round, your recruiter will typically extend a verbal offer followed by a written offer letter. Toast's offers commonly include base salary, equity (as a public company, this is typically in RSUs), and benefits. A standard background check follows acceptance. Onboarding at Toast is known for being structured and immersive, often including company-wide orientation sessions that introduce new hires to the restaurant industry context and Toast's product ecosystem.

Resume Tips for Toast

Critical Lead with Restaurant or Hospitality Industry Context

Toast's entire business exists to serve restaurants, and candidates who demonstrate familiarity with the industry have an inherent advantage. If you've worked in restaurants, with restaurant clients, or on hospitality technology products, make this prominent — ideally in your resume summary and in the first bullet of relevant roles. Even if your experience is tangential (e.g., building payment processing features or working in retail POS systems), frame it in terms Toast's recruiters will recognize.

Critical Mirror Toast's Job Description Language Precisely

Greenhouse parses resumes for keyword relevance, and Toast's recruiters use structured scorecards tied to the job description. Pull specific terminology from the posting — if a Software Engineer role mentions 'Java,' 'microservices,' and 'AWS,' use those exact terms rather than synonyms. For sales roles, include phrases like 'territory management,' 'SMB,' 'SaaS sales cycle,' or 'new business acquisition' if they appear in the listing. This alignment improves both automated parsing and human review.

Critical Quantify Your Impact with Metrics That Matter to Toast

Toast is a growth-stage public company that cares deeply about measurable outcomes. For engineering roles, quantify performance improvements, uptime, deployment frequency, or user-facing impact. For sales roles, include quota attainment percentages, territory revenue, number of accounts managed, and deal cycle length. For a Territory Account Executive resume, a bullet like 'Exceeded $1.2M annual quota by 118% across 45 SMB accounts in a defined geographic territory' speaks directly to what Toast's sales leadership evaluates.

Use a Clean, ATS-Compatible Format

Greenhouse handles standard resume formats well, but complex designs can cause parsing errors. Use a single-column layout with clearly labeled sections (Experience, Education, Skills). Avoid tables, text boxes, headers/footers with critical information, and graphics. Save as a PDF with selectable text — not a scanned image. A cleanly formatted resume ensures that Greenhouse extracts your information accurately into the candidate profile that Toast recruiters review.

Highlight SaaS and Platform Ecosystem Experience

Toast is a platform company — its value lies in integrating POS, payments, payroll, online ordering, and analytics into a unified system. If you've worked on platform products, API integrations, or multi-product ecosystems, emphasize this. Engineers should highlight experience with distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, or full-stack development across interconnected products. Sales professionals should showcase experience selling multi-product solutions or expanding accounts through cross-sell and upsell motions.

Showcase Ownership and Entrepreneurial Drive

Toast's culture celebrates people who take initiative and own outcomes end-to-end. Structure your resume bullets using a 'Challenge → Action → Result' framework that demonstrates you didn't just execute tasks — you identified problems, drove solutions, and delivered impact. Use verbs like 'spearheaded,' 'launched,' 'built,' and 'owned' rather than passive phrasing. This mirrors the ownership mentality Toast describes in its values and job postings.

Include a Tailored Skills Section with Toast's Tech Stack

Based on publicly available job postings, Toast's engineering teams commonly work with Java, Kotlin, React, TypeScript, AWS, and Kubernetes. QA roles reference Selenium, API testing, and CI/CD pipelines. Including a dedicated skills section with relevant technologies ensures Greenhouse's keyword matching works in your favor and gives recruiters a quick snapshot of your technical fit. Place this section near the top of your resume for maximum visibility.

Tailor for Territory-Specific Sales Roles

Toast hires heavily for Territory Account Executive positions in specific metro areas — from West Houston to Charlotte to Fairfield, CA. If you're applying for a field sales role, mention your knowledge of and presence in that local market. Reference local restaurant scenes, business communities, or relevant networks. Toast's sales model depends on reps who can build relationships within a defined geography, so demonstrating local market fluency gives you a meaningful edge.

ATS System: Greenhouse

Greenhouse is a structured hiring platform that Toast uses to manage its entire recruitment pipeline — from application intake through offer. The system parses uploaded resumes to extract candidate data, enables recruiters to score candidates against structured scorecards tied to each role's requirements, and helps hiring teams maintain consistent, bias-aware evaluation processes. Your resume and application responses are the primary inputs that determine whether you advance past the initial screen.

Submit your resume as a PDF with selectable text to ensure Greenhouse parses your information correctly — avoid image-based PDFs or highly designed formats
Use standard section headings like 'Experience,' 'Education,' and 'Skills' so Greenhouse's parser maps your information to the correct fields in your candidate profile
Include keywords from the job description verbatim, as Greenhouse enables recruiters to search and filter candidates by specific terms and skills
Complete all optional fields in the application form — Greenhouse scorecards may include criteria based on screening question responses, and blank fields can count against you
Apply to the most relevant 1-2 roles rather than submitting mass applications — Greenhouse tracks all your applications to the same company, and recruiters can see if you've applied to dozens of unrelated positions
Avoid tables, multi-column layouts, and graphics in your resume, as these can cause Greenhouse's parser to scramble your work history or miss key details
If the application includes an optional cover letter field, use it — Greenhouse attaches it directly to your profile, giving you extra space to articulate your connection to Toast's mission and the specific role

Complete Greenhouse Resume Guide

Interview Culture

Toast's interview process reflects its identity as a mission-driven technology company that values both technical excellence and genuine passion for the restaurant industry. Across departments, candidates commonly report a structured, multi-round process designed to evaluate hard skills, collaboration ability, and cultural alignment in roughly equal measure. For engineering roles (Software Engineer, QA Engineer, Senior Fullstack Engineer), expect a process that typically includes a recruiter screen, a technical phone screen or take-home challenge, and a virtual or in-person onsite consisting of 3-5 sessions. These sessions commonly cover coding (often in Java, Kotlin, or your language of choice), system design, and behavioral interviews. Pair programming and live debugging exercises are also reported. Toast's engineering culture leans toward pragmatic problem-solving — interviewers often care more about your thought process and how you handle ambiguity than whether you produce a textbook-perfect solution. For sales roles, particularly the Territory Account Executive positions that make up a significant portion of Toast's open requisitions, the process typically emphasizes real-world selling scenarios. Expect a mock discovery call or product pitch, often role-played as a conversation with a restaurant owner evaluating a new POS system. Interviewers assess your ability to ask insightful questions, handle objections, and articulate value in terms a busy restaurant operator would appreciate. Knowledge of the local market you'd cover is a differentiator. For corporate and strategic roles like Corporate Development Deal Lead, case-based interviews and financial modeling exercises are common, reflecting the analytical rigor these positions demand. Across all roles, Toast interviewers frequently ask about your connection to the company's mission. Questions like 'Why Toast?' and 'What draws you to the restaurant industry?' are not softballs — they're genuine culture-fit assessments. Candidates who can articulate a personal connection to food, hospitality, or small business empowerment tend to resonate. Toast also values feedback-friendly, low-ego collaborators; expect behavioral questions about times you received tough feedback, navigated disagreement, or supported a teammate. The overall tone of Toast interviews is commonly described as conversational, rigorous, and genuinely curious — interviewers want to understand how you think, not catch you off guard.

What Toast Looks For

Genuine passion for the restaurant industry and Toast's mission to empower food service operators — not performative enthusiasm, but real curiosity about the customers Toast serves
Ownership mentality and bias toward action, demonstrated through examples of driving initiatives from concept to measurable outcome without waiting for permission
Customer empathy and the ability to translate complex technology into terms that resonate with non-technical restaurant operators
Collaborative, low-ego working style — Toast's cross-functional product teams require people who share credit, welcome feedback, and elevate those around them
Technical depth appropriate to the role, whether that's proficiency in Java/Kotlin and distributed systems for engineers, or mastery of consultative SaaS sales methodology for Territory Account Executives
Comfort with ambiguity and the pace of a high-growth public company still building foundational processes in many areas
Demonstrated ability to learn quickly and develop domain expertise — many successful Toast employees had no restaurant industry background before joining but became deeply knowledgeable fast
Data-driven decision-making, with a track record of using metrics to prioritize work, evaluate outcomes, and course-correct

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the Toast hiring process typically take from application to offer?

Based on candidate reports, the full Toast hiring process commonly takes 3 to 6 weeks, depending on the role and team. Engineering roles with technical assessments and multi-session onsites tend toward the longer end, while sales roles — especially Territory Account Executive positions where Toast is actively scaling — can move more quickly if there's urgency in a particular market. After submitting your application through Greenhouse, you can typically expect to hear back within 1-2 weeks if you're selected for a recruiter screen. Following up with your recruiter at natural checkpoints is appropriate and encouraged.

Does Toast require a cover letter with applications?

Cover letters are typically optional in Toast's Greenhouse application portal, but submitting one is a strong strategic move — particularly because Toast is a mission-driven company where cultural alignment matters. Use your cover letter to articulate why you're specifically drawn to the restaurant technology space, how your background connects to Toast's mission, and what excites you about the particular role. Keep it concise (250-400 words) and avoid restating your resume. A thoughtful cover letter can differentiate you when recruiters are evaluating multiple qualified candidates for competitive roles.

What format should my resume be in when applying to Toast?

Submit your resume as a PDF with selectable text. Greenhouse, Toast's ATS, parses PDFs effectively as long as they use standard formatting — single column, clearly labeled sections, no tables or text boxes. Avoid Word documents (which can render inconsistently) and image-based PDFs (which can't be parsed). Keep your resume to one page if you have under 10 years of experience, or two pages for more senior roles like Senior Fullstack Engineer or Corporate Development Deal Lead. The goal is a clean document that both Greenhouse's parser and human reviewers can read effortlessly.

What should I prepare for a Toast sales interview, specifically for Territory Account Executive roles?

Toast's sales interviews for Territory Account Executive positions commonly include a mock pitch or discovery call where you role-play engaging a restaurant owner. Prepare by learning Toast's core product offerings — POS hardware, payment processing, online ordering, payroll, and team management — and practice explaining their value in plain, benefit-driven language. Research the specific territory you'd cover: know the local restaurant scene, understand common challenges for operators in that market (labor costs, delivery competition, thin margins), and be ready to discuss how you'd prospect and build pipeline from scratch. Also prepare data-driven examples of past quota attainment, territory growth, and deal cycle management.

Does Toast hire remote employees, or do I need to be near their Boston headquarters?

Toast offers a mix of in-office, hybrid, and remote roles depending on the function and team. Engineering and product roles may offer remote or hybrid flexibility, while field sales positions like Territory Account Executives are inherently location-based — you'll need to live in or very near the territory specified in the job posting. Corporate roles sometimes require presence in the Boston headquarters for key meetings and collaboration. Each job listing on careers.toasttab.com specifies its location requirement, so review this carefully before applying. Toast's Flex-designated roles typically offer the most geographic flexibility.

Can I apply to multiple roles at Toast simultaneously?

You can, but be strategic. Greenhouse tracks every application you submit to Toast under a single candidate profile, and recruiters can see your full application history. Applying to 10+ unrelated roles signals a lack of focus and can actually work against you. Instead, identify the 1-2 positions that most closely match your experience and career goals, and tailor each application specifically. If you're genuinely qualified for a Software Engineer I role and a QA Engineer II role, applying to both is reasonable — but applying to those plus five Territory Account Executive listings in different cities would raise red flags.

What level of restaurant industry experience does Toast expect from candidates?

Restaurant industry experience is valued but not universally required at Toast. For sales roles, having worked in or with restaurants can be a meaningful differentiator because it gives you natural credibility with the operators you'll be selling to. For engineering, QA, and corporate roles, prior restaurant experience is far less common but demonstrating genuine curiosity about the industry is essential. Many successful Toast employees joined without restaurant backgrounds — what matters is your willingness to develop deep empathy for restaurant operators and learn the domain quickly. If you have restaurant experience (even as a server or host during college), absolutely highlight it.

How does Toast evaluate culture fit during interviews?

Toast assesses culture fit through behavioral interview questions woven into every stage of the process, not through a single dedicated 'culture fit' round. Interviewers commonly explore themes like ownership (tell me about a time you drove something from idea to outcome), collaboration (describe a cross-functional disagreement and how you resolved it), customer empathy (how do you stay close to the end user), and feedback receptivity (share an example of tough feedback that changed your approach). Toast's culture prizes low-ego, high-accountability individuals who are genuinely energized by the company's restaurant community focus. Prepare specific STAR-format stories that demonstrate these qualities, ideally connected to scenarios relevant to Toast's work.

What tips can help my application get past Toast's ATS screening?

Since Toast uses Greenhouse, focus on three key areas: keyword alignment, clean formatting, and complete applications. First, read the job posting carefully and incorporate its specific terminology into your resume — if the posting says 'Kotlin' and 'microservices,' use those exact words rather than paraphrasing. Second, use a simple, single-column resume layout without tables, graphics, or headers containing critical information, so Greenhouse's parser accurately extracts your data. Third, fill out every field in the application form, including optional ones like cover letter and LinkedIn URL, as incomplete profiles may be deprioritized. Finally, craft your screening question responses thoughtfully — these are often used in Greenhouse's initial candidate evaluation scorecards.

Sample Open Positions

Sources

Toast Careers - Open Positions and Company Culture — Toast, Inc.
Toast Company Overview and Product Platform — Toast, Inc.
Toast Reviews and Interview Insights — Glassdoor
Greenhouse Applicant Tracking System - How It Works — Greenhouse Software