Principal Data Product Manager, Applied 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. The Customer Success Data and Analytics (CSDA) team supports Care Operations, Customer Success, Education, and Voice of the Customer. We are building a new generation of data products that extract structured, actionable insight from unstructured customer interactions using NLP, ML, and LLM-based approaches. As the Principal Data Product Manager, Applied AI, you will own the agenda for how AI-enriched data improves our understanding of the customer experience. You will prototype, validate, and scale a portfolio of AI-powered data products that give our CS organization insight it has never had before. You will also serve as a resource and thought partner for teammates and other teams across Toast who are working with CS data in an AI context, helping make that work faster, more consistent, and more reliable. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You will spend time in Snowflake and Hex building things, and you will spend time with CS leaders explaining what those things mean and why they matter. The right person for this role is equally comfortable doing both. A Day in the Life (Responsibilities) Enablement and Shared Practice Technical Resource: Serve as the go-to resource on applied AI and NLP with CS data for your CSDA teammates and other teams across Toast. Best Practices: Build and maintain a practical library of guidance regarding successful prompts, pitfalls to watch for, and how to structure CS data for AI use cases. Market Intelligence: Stay current on how CS data is being used with AI tools across the organization to keep CSDA ahead of the curve. Facilitation: Act as a facilitator for AI prototyping work, helping analysts and stakeholders structure experiments so outputs are reliable and usable. Applied AI and ML Product Development Portfolio Ownership: Drive an active portfolio of prototyping work focused on enriching the CSDA data model with insight extracted from unstructured contact data. Strategic Focus: Focus on contact classification, intelligent summarization, sentiment analysis, churn signal detection, and product mention extraction. End-to-End Design: Manage the pipeline from problem framing and prompt design to embedding generation, classifier training, and final production. Stakeholder Validation: Run structured validation processes, including codebook reviews and labeling sessions, to earn trust before products scale. Scaling and Productionalization Readiness Framework: Maintain a clear framework for deciding what is ready to scale based on business value, quality, and maintenance requirements. Engineering Partnership: Partner closely with the CSDA data engineering team to scope and hand off production-grade implementations. Quality Governance: Own the quality review process for AI products in production, including monitoring for output drift and driving recalibration. Product Advocacy: Serve as the face of these products with stakeholders, explaining how they work and being honest about their limitations. What You’ll Need to Thrive (Requirements) Relevant Experience: 6+ years of experience in analytics, data science, ML, or NLP in a data-intensive environment. AI Fluency: Practical fluency with LLMs, including prompt engineering, structured output extraction, and model evaluation. Product Instincts: You think about what you are building in terms of who uses it and how you will know if it is working. Project Leadership: Strong program and stakeholder management skills with the ability to move things forward without formal authority. Technical Expertise: Applied experience with text data and NLP/ML techniques such as LLMs, classifiers, or embeddings. Core Skills: Expert-level SQL and solid Python proficiency with the ability to build and iterate on ML pipelines independently. Communication Mastery: Ability to explain complex classification pipelines to non-technical leaders and push back on requirements when necessary. What Will Help You Stand Out (Nice to Haves) Specific Tooling: Experience with Snowflake Cortex, including COMPLETE and EMBED_TEXT functions. Library Familiarity: Familiarity with scikit-learn, spaCy, Hugging Face, or sentence-transformers. Domain Expertise: Prior work in a Customer Success, Care, or CX analytics context. Workflow Design: Experience building human-in-the-loop validation workflows or labeling interfaces. Proven Impact: A track record of prototyping things that made it into production and were successfully used. 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. The base salary range for this role is listed below. The starting salary will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, our total rewards components include cash compensation (overtime, bonus/commissions if eligible), equity, and benefits. You can learn more about how we align pay with local labor markets in our Geographic Pay Zone Philosophy. Pay Range $119,000—$190,000 USD How Toast Uses AI in its Hiring Process Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is Baked into our Recipe for Success At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry is one of the most diverse, and we embrace that diversity with authenticity, inclusivity, respect, and humility. By embedding these principles into our culture and design, we create equitable opportunities for all and raise the bar in delivering exceptional experiences. We Thrive Together We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the restaurant community. To learn more about how we work globally and regionally, check out: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast. Apply today! Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact candidateaccommodations@toasttab.com. ------ For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.