Member of Technical Staff, Lead Researcher

The posting, as DoorDash wrote it

About the Role

DoorDash is building an AI Research org from the ground up, and we're hiring our founding researchers. 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.

DoorDash sits on a uniquely valuable substrate for AI research: a real-world, multi-sided marketplace operating at massive scale, with millions of consumers, merchants, and Dashers generating data that no academic lab and few companies can access. We want to build a research org that takes that seriously — one that produces work the broader field cares about, and that fundamentally reshapes how local commerce works.

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 da

[…]
success have no place at DoorDash. We value a diverse workforce – people who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming, LGBTQIA+, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, differently-abled, caretakers and parents, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Thank you to the Level Playing Field Institute for this statement of non-discrimination.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and any other state or local hiring regulations, we will consider for employment any qualified applicant, including those with arrest and conviction records, in a manner consistent with the applicable regulation.

If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.

Notice Regarding Use of AI and Automated Tools: To streamline our hiring process, DoorDash utilizes an automated recruitment tool called Metaview.

How it works: Metaview assists our recruiting team by evaluating job related qualifications and characteristics in connection with hiring. The tool is designed and used to support - rather than replace - human decision-making; trained personnel make final decisions with meaningful human review and oversight, and DoorDash does not use Metaview or other AI-enabled tool in a manner that has the effect of subjecting applicants or employees to discrimination based on any protected characteristic or proxy or for engaging in any protected activity under applicable law.

Data Retention, Privacy & Bias Audit: Data collected during this process is retained in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy https://help.doordash.com/en-us/legal/article/ax-privacy-notice and applicable state laws. In compliance with New York City Local Law 144, the independent bias audit summary for Metaview is publicly available for review at https://trust.warden-ai.com/metaview/application-review .