Senior Design Operations Program Manager

Toast is driven by building the restaurant platform that helps restaurants adapt, take control, and get back to what they do best: building the businesses they love.

We are seeking a Senior Design Operations Program Manager – Research Ops to lead and scale our research operations strategy, drive cultural change, and shape how research is embedded across R&D at Toast. This position is part of the Design Operations team, which reports into the Chief Design Officer.

This role will be instrumental in spearheading Toast’s evolving research approach, ensuring that customer-centric learning is embedded across all roles. Our dedicated research team—spanning mixed methods, quantitative research, and service design—will focus on our most complex, high-impact research challenges, while our product development teams take ownership of ongoing customer conversations and ensure our products are satisfying customer needs. As a leader in research enablement, you will create scalable processes and a culture where teams feel empowered—not just equipped—to learn from customers and act on those insights throughout the product development cycle.

You’ll be a strategic leader and change agent, helping to bridge the gap between research and decision-making across the organization. This is an opportunity to build research ops excellence, not just through process creation, but by influencing behaviors, leading adoption, and ensuring research drives action.

About this roll* (Responsibilities)

• Collaborate on and drive the strategic roadmap to enable a customer-centric learning culture, identifying key barriers and implementing solutions across multiple fronts—tools, processes, education, and leadership engagement.
• Design and implement scalable research operations, building proficient systems for participant recruitment, governance, compliance (e.g., GDPR), and logistics to ensure research is accessible and actionable.
• Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to integrate customer learning into strategy, prioritization, and execution, ensuring insights directly inform decision-making.
• Assess, implement, and manage research tools and platforms that enhance efficiency, compliance, and collaboration across teams.
• Develop training, frameworks, and self-serve resources to enable teams to conduct sound research at scale.
• Establish scalable knowledge-sharing systems to ensure teams can easily access, apply, and act on research insights.

The right ingredients* (Requirements)

• 5+ years of experience in research operations, design operations, or a combination of research operations and hands-on research experience.
• A strategic mindset—able to balance short-term operational needs with long-term vision and scalability.
• Experience partnering with senior leaders to drive alignment and influence decision-making at scale.
• Proven experience developing and scaling research operations in a high-growth environment, including setting vision and leading adoption to ensure research is a deeply embedded practice across teams.
• Proficient ability to synthesize complex feedback from multiple stakeholders into actionable strategies.
• A history of navigating ambiguity and directing action in dynamic, cross-functional environments.
• Deep experience in research enablement, including participant recruitment, compliance management, and research tooling.
• Great communication skills, with the ability to influence and build trust across teams.

Our Spread* of Total Rewards

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and inspire 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.

*Bread puns encouraged but not required