Principal Product Manager, Voice AI

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.

Toast is launching a new initiative to bring the power of voice AI into the in-store restaurant experience
. While voice has transformed drive-thru and phone ordering, we believe there’s a large opportunity to make in-store experiences better for guests and more proficient for restaurant teams. This team will explore voice capabilities across front-of-house (guest ordering, service interactions, POS assistance) and back-of-house (kitchen coordination, hands-free workflows, inventory signals). As the Principal Product Manager — Voice AI (In-Store) on the Commerce Platform, you’ll define strategy, evaluate vendors and partners, run zero→one discovery and pilots in real restaurants, and lead commercialization — creating a reusable voice platform that powers multiple use cases across the restaurant.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Define vision & portfolio strategy. Own the long-term vision and multi-quarter roadmap for in-store voice AI and the platform that enables multiple use cases across FOH/BOH. Balance short-term pilots with long-term platform investments.
• Run vendor & technical evaluation. Lead technical evaluation of voice and AI vendors (ASR, NLU, TTS, edge inference, on-device options) and create benchmarking frameworks for accuracy, latency, privacy, and cost.
• Lead commercial conversations. Drive vendor commercial discussions (pricing models, licensing, SLAs) and surface negotiation points — partnering with Procurement and Legal who finalize contracts and budget approvals.
• Drive zero → one discovery and pilots. Plan and execute discovery, rapid prototyping, and in-restaurant pilots; iterate based on operational feedback and scale successful experiments.
• Design a reusable voice platform. Define APIs, integration patterns, data flows, and tooling that make voice capabilities reusable across guest experiences, staff workflows, and integrations with POS, kitchen systems, and telemetry services.
• Lead GTM & commercialization. Define pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy with Product Marketing, Sales, and Operations; identify commercial models that fit restaurants of different sizes.
• Coordinate cross-functional delivery. Align Engineering, Hardware Ops, Reliability, Security, Data, Research, Design, Care/Onboarding, and GTM partners to de-risk delivery and adoption.
• Drive operational readiness & reliability. Define operational playbooks, observability, edge/online failover modes, and post-launch monitoring to ensure reliable in-store behavior and low support cost.
• Champion field research & validation. Spend time in restaurants to learn operational workflows, validate prototypes, and iterate with real staff and guests.
• Mentor & shape product practice. Coach senior PMs and engineers on voice/AI product development, vendor evaluation, and responsible AI practices; contribute to the Product Playbook.
• Embrace and advocate for the use of AI tools to accelerate product discovery, streamline execution, and explore new product experiences - helping shape how we build and what we build.

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• AI product delivery experience. ~8+ years shipping complex software products with demonstrated ownership of multi-team programs or a major product portfolio, and experience delivering AI-enabled features or products.
• AI Model Evaluation. Hands-on experience defining and owning AI model evaluation (examples: WER/CER, intent accuracy, wake-word false accept/reject, latency, completion/task success), building continuous evaluation and model ops processes (drift detection, automated regression tests, A/B testing, rollback/mitigation playbooks), and partnering with ML teams to run experiments and error analysis.
• Zero → one experience. Proven track record taking a product from discovery through prototype and pilot to scale.
• Vendor evaluation & commercial acumen. Hands-on experience evaluating AI/voice vendors and participating in vendor commercial conversations (note: Procurement/Legal finalize…