Associate Manager, AI Research Lab Strategy & Operations

The posting, as DoorDash wrote it

About the Team

AI Research Lab is one of DoorDash’s frontier innovation hubs, focused on building the foundation for an AI-native future across our three core audiences: consumers, merchants, and dashers. As AI capabilities accelerate, the AI Research Lab operates at the center of technical exploration and real-world execution — connecting frontier model research, internal platform investments, operator teams, and strategic external partners.

Our mission is to translate cutting-edge AI research into scalable, production-ready systems that drive measurable business impact. We combine deep technical rigor with strong operational execution to ensure that breakthrough capabilities become durable competitive advantages for DoorDash.

About the Role

As an Associate Manager, Strategy & Operations on our AI Research Lab, you will play a central role in converting frontier AI advancements into shipped products and scalable infrastructure. You will operate across research, product, and operations to move from early discovery and experimentation to deployment and impact.

This role sits at the intersection of customer insight, technical innovation, and business execution. You will help define and scale the Lab’s most important bets while building the foundations that enable AI applications to compound over time.

You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will …

• Reimagining core experiences through AI, such as the merchant journey, by partnering directly with in-field merchants, sales, support, product, and engineering teams. You will help unify major initiatives into a coherent, AI-native interaction model.
• Own revenue-driving AI initiatives, operating as the accountable business owner for high-priority AI bets and ensuring clear linkage between technical progress and financial outcomes.
• Lead business planning cycles, developing go-to-market strategies for AI-powered products and capabilities, overseeing execution through structured project plans, resource allocation, and KPI tracking.
• Develop new business metrics and measurement frameworks, including:
• Defining what should be measured and why
• Establishing performance thresholds using data-driven benchmarking
• Localizing metrics across geographies and market types
• Driving AI adoption across DoorDash by enabling non-technical teams with enterprise tools, workflows, and experimentation sandboxes that integrate AI into daily operations.
• Building scalable AI foundations, including evaluation datasets, guardrails, monitoring systems, and strategies for custom foundation models that ensure safety, reliability, and long-term leverage.
• Operationalizing frontier technologies from external partners, translating research breakthroughs into revenue-generating product capabilities and production systems.
• Leading rapid experimentation cycles, validating product-market fit, measuring business impact, and ensuring AI initiatives translate into tangible outcomes.

This role req
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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 .