About the Role

This is not a role inside an existing team - it's a role that defines what the team becomes. You'll have an outsized influence on the research agenda, hiring, culture, infrastructure choices, and how research connects to the rest of DoorDash.

You should apply if you want to do ambitious, publishable research in an environment with the data, compute, and operational reach to actually deploy what you build.
What You'll Do

• Set the research agenda for one or more areas of DoorDash AI Research, in close collaboration with the founding team and leadership
• Lead high-impact research projects end-to-end - from problem framing through publication and, where appropriate, production deployment
• Help build the team - interview, recruit, and mentor researchers, engineers, and fellows joining the org
• Shape the org's culture and operating model - how we publish, how we collaborate with product teams, how we balance open research with proprietary work
• Partner across DoorDash with ML platform, product, and operations teams to identify the highest-leverage research bets and translate findings into real-world impact

What You'll Have Access To

• Novel proprietary data at marketplace scale - logistics traces, merchant operations, consumer behavior, real-time supply and demand signals, and longitudinal data unavailable anywhere else
• Scalable data collection - ability to design and run structured data collection, leveraging DoorDash's world-class operational scale, from in-the-wild image and video capture to operational task demonstrations and human-in-the-loop annotation, at a scale and physical-world coverage no other org can match
• High compute budgets for training and inference, sized to support frontier-scale experimentation including large-model pre-training and post-training, RL training runs, and large-scale evaluation sweeps
• Full research infrastructure - DoorDash's internal RL stack, RL environments built on real operational systems, training and evaluation pipelines, and agent evaluation harnesses, with engineering support to extend them as your research demands
• Direct access to leadership - a seat at the table for the decisions that shape the research org, with the autonomy to operate as a principal-level researcher
• Publication freedom - we expect and support publication at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, RSS, CoRL, KDD, etc.) with a fast, supportive internal review process
• Compute and data for external collaborators - budget to bring in academic collaborators, fellows, and visiting researchers as your agenda requires

Research Areas

We are broadly interested in researchers across the following areas, though the right candidate may reshape this list:

• Agentic systems for logistics and local commerce - long-horizon planning, tool use, multi-agent coordination, and evaluation methodologies for agents operating in physical-world marketplaces
• Memory and personalization - transfer RL, continual learning, harness-based improvements, and systems that adapt to individual consumers, merchants, and Dashers over time without catastrophic forgetting or unsafe drift
• Foundation models for marketplace dynamics - forecasting, pricing, matching, and personalization at marketplace scale, including domain-specific pre-training and post-training
• Evaluation and measurement - new benchmarks, eval harnesses, and methodologies for ML systems deployed in messy, real-world operational settings
• Multimodal understanding - vision, speech, and language applied to merchant catalogs, in-store and on-the-road imagery, and consumer interfaces
• Robotics and embodied AI for last-mile delivery - perception, planning, and learning systems for the physical edge of the marketplace

Who We're Looking For

• A strong research track record: first-author publications at top ML venues, or equivalent demonstrated output (widely-used systems, influential open-source work, or research artifacts adopted at scale)
• Experience leading ambitious research projects end-to-end, from problem framing through to results that other people built on
• Taste: the ability to identify which problems are worth working on, when an approach is exhausted, and when a result is real
• A builder's instinct: comfortable working close to real systems and real data, not just on benchmarks
• Excitement about the founding-team aspects of the role: hiring, agenda-setting, culture-building, and partnering across functions
• Impact, you want to ship frontier systems to production and see your work being leveraged by hundreds of millions of consumers
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and a track record of mentoring or developing other researchers

PhD in a relevant field is typical but not required. We weigh demonstrated research output and judgment far more heavily than credentials.
Compensation

The successful candidate's starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. Base salary is localized according to an employee's work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That's why we offer a comprehensive benefits package to all regular employees, which includes a 401(k) plan with employer matching, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, wellness benefits, commuter benefits match, paid time off and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.

See below for paid time off details:

• For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
• For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).

The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

$203,500-$299,300 USD