Principal Product Manager (Voice AI)

Role Overview

Principal Product Manager for Voice AI at Toast, leading the strategy and commercialization of in-store voice AI for restaurants. You’ll evaluate voice/AI vendors, run discovery and pilots in real restaurants, and drive measurable operational and guest-experience impact.

Key Missions

• Define long-term strategy and vision for voice AI in the restaurant environment, balancing short- and long-term investments.
• Lead technical vendor evaluation, creating frameworks for accuracy, latency, privacy, and cost.
• Plan and execute research, rapid prototyping, and restaurant pilot testing, iterating based on operational feedback.

Responsibilities

• Own the full product journey from discovery → prototype → pilot → scale.
• Lead cross-functional alignment across hardware, engineering, operations, and GTM on high-visibility initiatives.
• Drive launch and adoption of voice AI pilots, focusing on:
  • operational impact
  • guest experience improvements
  • platform reuse
  • reliability and support outcomes
  • AI health and model performance
• Partner with ML teams to run experiments and perform error analysis.
• Establish AI model evaluation and continuous model evaluation processes.

Requirements

• 8+ years delivering complex software products with ownership of multi-team programs or major product portfolios.
• Experience delivering AI-enabled features/products.
• Strong cross-team leadership and stakeholder management.
• Demonstrated vendor evaluation experience and involvement in vendor commercial discussions.
• Proven experience with on-site discovery and validating prototypes in operational environments (physical venues/restaurant-like settings).
• Ability to build a platform mindset (reusable APIs/capabilities supporting multiple downstream use cases).
• Hands-on AI model evaluation experience (e.g., WER/CER, intent accuracy, wake-word false accept/reject, latency, completion/task success), plus continuous evaluation/model ops.

Nice to Have

• Prior voice product experience (ASR/NLU/TTS) and/or direct experience with speech teams.
• Exposure to voice hardware considerations (far-field audio, beamforming, noise cancellation, embedded audio processing).
• Conversational UX/dialog design experience (state management, turn-taking, error recovery, graceful degradation).
• Experience with on-device/edge inference and hybrid cloud/edge voice architectures.
• Familiarity with voice privacy/compliance/PII handling and relevant regulations.
• Background in restaurant/retail/physical-world operations.
• Experience with ML lifecycle tooling and production A/B testing for AI features.

Remote / Location

• Full remote (New York, US).