Product Designer
From $39/yr
<p>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.</p> <p>Toast is building a unified, enterprise-grade inventory platform that will power inventory for every Toast location, Restaurants and Retail alike. We are seeking a highly skilled, AI-native Product Designer to shape that experience: someone with a strong portfolio, a focus on exceptional UI design, and the hands-on ability to build working prototypes with AI tools like Replit, Magic Patterns, or Claude. This role involves designing for the unique needs of a diverse customer base, including restaurants, hybrid models, convenience stores, bottle shops, grocery stores, and beyond.</p> <p>You will be the product designer for inventory platform capabilities built by our Chennai teams, working day to day with a Chennai-based product manager counterpart and reporting to Toast Retail's design leadership in the U.S. Together you will turn product strategy into experiences customers can trust with their stock, their costs, and their books.</p> <p><strong>Why This Role Matters</strong></p> <p>Inventory is where a store's money sits. When stock counts are wrong, invoices are keyed in by hand, or costs don't reach the accounting system, owners lose margin and hours they don't have. The workflows you design will decide how supplier data, invoices, stock, costs, and revenue move through Toast and into our customers' accounting platforms, and whether the people doing that work, often at the end of a long shift, feel in control or buried in it.</p> <p>You will be Toast Retail's design presence in our Chennai office: the on-site design partner for its product and engineering teams, and part of Toast's wider design community, including product designers in Bangalore. Because this work spans regions and time zones, the role calls for strong autonomous design judgment: keeping local teams unblocked, making well-informed design and scope tradeoffs within the broader product vision, and bringing US-based design, product, and business stakeholders in when direction, customer impact, or strategic choices need broader alignment.</p> <p><strong>A day in the life (Responsibilities) </strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Own design for your product area:</strong> Take your work from early discovery through shipped UI, connecting each workflow to the broader inventory platform vision.</li> <li><strong>Prototype with AI:</strong> Use AI prototyping tools such as Replit, Magic Patterns, or Claude to build working, interactive prototypes with realistic data, so ideas can be tested with customers and engineers before the team commits to them. Use AI across the rest of your practice too, from synthesizing research to exploring concepts, validating outputs carefully and modeling responsible, secure use of AI for the team.</li> <li><strong>Design AI-first workflows:</strong> Identify where AI can materially reduce customer effort, such as reading invoices, normalizing supplier and item data, and recommending catalog and accounting mappings. Design just as carefully for when it is unsure: how customers review low-confidence results, correct mistakes, and come to trust the system.</li> <li><strong>Engage directly with customers:</strong> Research with retail and restaurant operators, and with the internal teams who support them, to understand their inventory needs, and translate those insights into design direction and testable ideas.</li> <li><strong>Make complex data feel simple:</strong> Turn supplier catalogs, mappings, sync status, and errors into experiences that are clear, forgiving, and fast, on desktop and in the hand.</li> <li><strong>Collaborate early and often:</strong> Partner closely with product managers and engineers in Chennai and the U.S., sharing work early, communicating design rationale clearly, and helping the team make good decisions quickly.</li> <li><strong>Raise the craft bar:</strong> Deliver pixel-perfect UI, apply and extend the Toast design system with good judgment, and contribute to the quality of the wider Retail design practice.</li> </ul> <p>You will be a central collaborator within a cross-functional team of designers, product managers, and engineers, designing sophisticated, inventory-centric capabilities such as:</p> <ul> <li>Invoice digitization, including AI-driven extraction of invoice headers and line items</li> <li>EDI ingestion and mapping</li> <li>Supplier and item data models</li> <li>Native mobile experiences for key inventory workflows</li> <li>Migrating existing customers onto the new inventory platform</li> <li>Accounting and other integrations that keep stock levels, Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), revenue, and accounting records accurate across channels</li> </ul> <p><strong>Team and Impact</strong></p> <p>You will join a passionate team dedicated to driving the consistency, integrity, strategy, and vision of Toast's next-generation product experience. The team is co-located in Chennai and the U.S. While the role sits in the Retail line of business, its scope and impact are cross-product: you will deliver inventory functionality that benefits both Retail and Restaurant customers, and help scale those capabilities as Toast expands into new markets.</p> <p>A key part of this work involves building on Toast's investments in AI-driven invoice scanning and other efforts led by our Chennai teams. You will partner closely with engineering and data teams in Chennai who are already building core pieces of this technology stack, including EDI and document-processing components.</p> <p><strong>What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Experience & Leadership (3+ years):</strong> Demonstrated ability to lead the solution for a product area, craft compelling visual experiences, and connect this work to a broader product vision.</li> <li><strong>AI-Native Practice:</strong> AI is part of how you work every day, not an occasional experiment. You use tools like Claude, Replit, or Magic Patterns to research, explore, and prototype, and you can build working prototypes to test ideas with customers and engineers. Crucially, you can tell valuable AI integration from mere hype, in your own process and in the product.</li> <li><strong>Core UX/UI Expertise:</strong> Solid understanding of UX principles and best practices for both web and native mobile applications, along with a strong grasp of platform-specific UX and UI patterns.</li> <li><strong>Autonomy & Initiative:</strong> Ability to navigate and initiate work on undefined projects, efficiently gathering the information needed to begin, and to keep moving when key partners are in another time zone.</li> <li><strong>Collaboration & Communication:</strong> Strong communication skills, a proactive mindset for sharing work early and often, and the ability to build trusting relationships across functions and regions.</li> <li><strong>Design Tool Proficiency:</strong> Proficient in design software (preferably Figma), including maintaining clean files and delivering pixel-perfect final UI designs for handoff (to a developer or an AI prototyping tool).</li> <li><strong>Adaptability & Feedback:</strong> Able to take feedback constructively and pivot quickly when necessary.</li> <li><strong>User Empathy:</strong> A strong ability to understand and empathize with users, designing digital experiences that delight and create a sense of accomplishment, especially within stressful or monotonous workflows.</li> <li><strong>Design Systems:</strong> Familiarity with corporate design systems, knowing how to apply them appropriately, and the judgment to push beyond them when innovation requires it.</li> <li><strong>Customer Engagement:</strong> Willingness to engage directly with customers to gather feedback and generate ideas for advancing product features.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What will help you stand out (Nice to Haves)</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience designing data-heavy operational or B2B software, such as inventory, supply chain, procurement, or accounting tools.</li> <li>Experience designing AI or machine-learning features that include human review, confidence, or correction.</li> <li>Design system experience (including creation and maintenance).</li> <li>Experience contributing directly to a production codebase alongside engineers, for example opening pull requests for UI changes.</li> <li>Prior experience in a startup environment or on zero-to-one projects.</li> </ul> <p data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><strong>AI at Toast</strong></p> <p>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 ch
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