Toast coding interview prep
Practical, restaurant-flavoured problems — model the domain, then make it correct.
What the loop actually looks like
Toast's loop runs a recruiter screen, a roughly one-hour technical screen, and a final panel that mixes coding, system design, and behavioural rounds. The questions lean practical rather than contest-style: orders, menus, scheduling, and payment edge cases, often framed as a small class or API you'd actually ship into a point-of-sale system. Difficulty sits in the medium band, so reliability matters more than reaching for a hard-tier trick.
What they reward
- Problems drawn from real operations rather than abstract puzzles
- Modelling the domain — designing a small class or API around the problem
- Hash maps, intervals, and data wrangling over exotic algorithms
- Edge cases that bite in production: offline terminals, retries, duplicate orders
- Behavioural rounds about ownership and working close to the customer
Patterns to drill first
Problems worth your time
In priority order. Open one to read the approach, or generate an interactive lesson and watch it run.
Tips specific to this loop
- — Design the interface before the algorithm — many rounds here are 'write a small class', so name the methods and state first.
- — Ask about the product context. Interviewers respond well to questions about how the feature would actually be used in a restaurant.
- — Say the failure modes out loud: a terminal that drops offline, a retried payment, a duplicate order. That's the differentiator on a practical problem.
- — Don't over-index on hard graph theory. Clean, correct medium work plus good judgement is what passes this loop.
Drill these with interactive lessons
Generate a step-by-step lesson for any problem above — trace every variable and watch the pattern move until it clicks.
Start a free lessonPrepping for other companies
Our own editorial read on this loop, based on publicly reported experiences — not leaked or current question banks.