Toast Software Engineer Interview Questions
6+ questions from real Toast Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.
Round Types
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Questions
R1 Given a stock price of 1 day for a day, create a method that would return the maximum profit of the day, given the following conditions. You can only buy and sell once. The difference between t
Toast SDE-2 Technical Interview Round 1 Maximum Profit Bread Problem
📌 Problem: Maximum Profit with 5-Day Selling Constraint You are given two integer arrays cost and sales, where: cost[i] represents the cost of making a sourdough bread on day i sales[i] represents the
LeetCode #121: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock. Difficulty: Easy. Topics: Array, Dynamic Programming. Asked at Toast in the last 6 months.
## Problem You are given a menu where each item has a base price. A list of discount rules is provided as `(item_id, discount_type, value)`. Discount types are `"percent"` (e.g., 10 means 10% off) and `"fixed"` (e.g., 2.00 means $2 off). Multiple discounts can apply to one item -- apply them in order. Return the final price for each item (minimum price is $0.00). ```python def resolve_prices( menu: dict[str, float], # {item_id: base_price} rules: list[tuple[str, str, float]] # (item_id, type, value) ) -> dict[str, float]: pass ``` **Example:** ``` menu = {"burger": 10.00, "fries": 4.00, "soda": 2.50} rules = [ ("burger", "percent", 10), # 10% off -> $9.00 ("burger", "fixed", 1.00), # then $1 off -> $8.00 ("fries", "percent", 50), # 50% off -> $2.00 ] -> {"burger": 8.00, "fries": 2.00, "soda": 2.50} ``` ## Follow-ups 1. Does the order of applying percent vs. fixed discounts matter mathematically? Give a proof or counterexample. 2. How would you handle a "buy one get one free" rule that depends on another item being in the cart? 3. What is the best data structure for storing and quickly querying discount rules when there are thousands of items? 4. How would you audit the discount pipeline to log each step's intermediate price for debugging?
## Problem Determine if a string can be made a palindrome under some additional constraints (e.g., at most k deletions). ## Likely LeetCode equivalent Similar to LC 680 Valid Palindrome II. ## Tags strings, toast, palindrome
## Problem Search for a pattern in a string, possibly with wildcard or partial matching requirements. ## Likely LeetCode equivalent Similar to LC 28 Find the Index of the First Occurrence in a String. ## Tags strings, sliding_window, toast
What Toast Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews
Toast Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 6+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.
The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.
How To Use This Question Set
Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in Toast Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.
Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of Toast's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.
Round-by-Round Expectations
Toast Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.
Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.
Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination
Reports tagged "no hire" at Toast Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.
Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of Toast Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.
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