About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join Agentic Foundations with a primary focus on Vertical Agent Development. You will own the continuous improvement of our flagship agents, starting with the Ask Assistant, using an eval-driven loop to make them faster, more cost-efficient, and more reliable for millions of customers. You will also help us bring this approach to new agentic experiences for Merchants and Dashers, turning promising ideas into production-ready agents.

This is a chance to work at the intersection of LLMs, agents, post-training, and evals on problems that ship. You will partner closely with engineers working on agentic memory, agent-compatible product representations, and post-training of small language models (SLMs), so that what we learn from production agents feeds directly back into our foundations, and what we build there makes our agents better.

You will report into the engineering lead on our New Verticals AI/ML team. We expect this role to be hybrid with some time in-office and some time remote.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will...

• Raise the quality of our Consumer agents: build and refine our eval harness-optimization loop to pinpoint failure modes, then iterate on prompts, tools, skills, and context, and measure the impact on real customer tasks.
• Find the best balance of quality, latency, and cost: run rigorous experiments, including fine-tuning open-weights models and deploying small language models (SLMs) where they can replace or augment larger LLMs.
• Launch new agents: take agentic opportunities for Merchants and Dashers from early exploration to production.
• Turn foundations into product impact: work with teammates on agentic memory, agent-compatible product representations, and post-training SLMs for steerable generative recommendation, and bring those capabilities into production agents.
• Shape the roadmap: partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to define an ML-driven strategy for our fast-growing grocery and retail delivery business.

We're excited about you because you have...

• 3+ years of industry ML experience, including hands-on work building and shipping LLM-based agents (tool use, context management, prompting, guardrails) and improving them with evals and data
• Experience with post-training or fine-tuning of open-weights models (e.g., SFT, preference optimization, or RL), ideally including small language models, and sound judgment on quality, latency, and cost trade-offs
• Strong foundation in NLP and machine learning, with proficiency in Python and frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• M.S. or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Math, or another quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience, plus a collaborative, growth-minded approach and a drive for measurable impact

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 ranges for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

I4

$137,100-$201,600 USD

I5

$167,800-$246,800 USD

I6

$203,500-$299,300 USD