Principal Product Manager, Kitchen Operations

Location: Boston Preferred 

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 Kitchen Operations team owns one of Toast's most operationally critical and strategically exciting products: the Kitchen Display System (KDS). Deployed across tens of thousands of restaurants, Toast KDS is the connective tissue between front-of-house and back-of-house, routing tickets to the right prep stations, managing order sequencing, and helping kitchens run fast and accurately under pressure. KDS has strong growth across SMB, enterprise, and international segments.

Our vision is KDS in the vast majority of Toast kitchens within the next few years. Getting there means three things: supporting the most sophisticated enterprise kitchen workflows in the market, differentiating through kitchen data and AI-powered operational insights, and growing adoption among the restaurants that still run on paper tickets.

This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role at the intersection of restaurant operations, hardware-software product, and applied AI. You'll shape how hundreds of thousands of kitchen workers run their stations every day — and you'll be the one building the data and agent layer that lets kitchens run smarter, not just faster.

A day in the life (Responsibilities) 

• Own and drive the KDS product strategy — enterprise workflow depth, data differentiation, SMB attach growth, and the agentic AI roadmap — connecting investments to Toast's kitchen adoption vision and near-term business outcomes including ARR growth, support ticket reduction, and enterprise retention.
• Define where agentic AI creates real value in the kitchen: proactive prep time adjustments based on real-time order load, automatic kitchen configuration changes tied to labor schedules or ordering channel mix, intelligent ticket routing and load balancing — and build the investment case to pursue the highest-leverage bets.
• Own KDS delivery end-to-end, working directly with large restaurant groups to translate complex, high-stakes workflow requirements into scalable product decisions that serve the whole market.
• Lead the KDS kitchen data strategy: define what kitchen efficiency insights should look like for operators at every scale, from API-first analytics for enterprise operators to actionable reporting for SMBs, and sequence the investments to unlock it.
• Shape and validate the business case for the next-generation KDS strategy — 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 — bonus points if it spans hardware and software and/or have experience in food & beverage.
• Creative and strategic: you don't just optimize existing products — 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 don't need to have shipped an agent, but you should have a clear perspective on where autonomous action creates real value vs. real risk.
• Track record of working directly with enterprise customers, translating nuanced, high-stakes 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 kitchen 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, enterprise customer success, sales, 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.