Senior Director, Software Engineering - Payments, Fraud & Risk

About Toast:

Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.

As a Senior Director of FinTech Engineering, you will lead engineering leaders and teams focused on merchant-side payments, enabling restaurants to operate securely and at scale. Your scope includes building and evolving core payments capabilities with a strong emphasis on fraud and risk management, compliance, and resilient transaction processing, alongside core APIs and payment primitives that support both current and future products.

You will collaborate closely with peers across Toast, shaping product direction through technical insight and contributing to the long-term technical roadmap. You’ll partner with product and design counterparts to validate and deliver solutions that address real customer needs. Your leadership will focus on growing high-performing teams, developing their skills, and driving creative ways to improve effectiveness and efficiency. On any given day, you might be reviewing solution designs, aligning cross-functional teams, collaborating on strategic roadmaps, or conducting 1:1s with your reports.

About this roll* (Responsibilities):

• Drive the delivery of meaningful business outcomes across multiple teams by leading planning, execution, and measurement of impact.
• Partner closely with cross-functional leaders across Product, UX, Engineering, Business, Customer Care, FinTech Operations, Partnerships, Marketing, and TechOps to define valuable, actionable work and ensure end-to-end software delivery, including team ownership of monitoring, continuous improvement, and production issue resolution.
• Champion the adoption of AI tools and practices to accelerate development, enhance team velocity, and pioneer new ways of building, setting the standard for an AI-first engineering organization.
• Continuously incorporate advances in software technology and industry best practices to improve product quality and delivery.
• Shape Toast’s broader mission and strategy by aligning technical execution with current and future business needs, energizing teams, and providing clarity for stakeholders.
• Build and grow high-performing, inclusive teams that meet evolving business demands.
• Define and support career development plans, and mentor both new and experienced Engineering Managers and Team Leads in a high-performance environment that fosters growth and development.
• Contribute to building Toast’s brand as an innovative, high-tech, high-growth leader in both the Restaurant and FinTech industries.

Do you have the right ingredients*? (Requirements):

• 20+ years of experience building and operating software in SaaS environments, including 5+ years in senior leadership or equivalent roles.
• Partner with C-level executives to shape FinTech strategy, guide investment decisions, and ensure engineering execution supports Toast’s long-term business goals.
• Experience leading multiple engineering groups and leaders to bring new products to market and scale existing platforms in a high-performance SaaS (or comparable) organization.
• Accountability for broader business outcomes, including revenue growth, customer experience, product adoption, and regulatory compliance.
• Own the technical vision and execution of Toast’s core payments platform, ensuring scalable, secure, and compliant transaction processing and global payment integrations.
• Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for revenue-critical, highly available payment systems, with accountability for uptime, latency, correctness, and financial integrity.
• Demonstrated experience building and scaling large-scale payment systems in a fintech or payments-heavy SaaS environment, including high-volume transaction processing and financial reconciliation.
• Strong background in payment rails, processors, and card networks, with hands-on leadership delivering secure, compliant, and highly reliable payment platforms.
• Experience operating mission-critical financial systems with strict SLAs, auditability, and regulatory requirements.
• Deep understanding of payment networks, regulatory compliance (e.g., PSD2, KYC/AML), and emerging fraud trends (e.g., account takeover, synthetic identity).
• Define and execute the end-to-end fraud and risk management strategy across all payment methods (e.g., credit cards, ACH, digital wallets).
• Partner with Fraud, Risk, Compliance, and Product leaders to evolve fraud and risk management, including fraud detection, disputes, and chargebacks at scale.
• Demonstrated ability and desire to grow and develop engineering leaders, mentoring both emerging and experienced managers in high-performance environments.

AI at Toast

At Toast 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 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.