Member of Technical Staff - Applied AI Research at Doordashusa — San Francisco, CA

DoorDash’s mission is to empower local economies. With AI, we believe there’s a huge opportunity to leverage agentic technology to help businesses grow their sales, to create more personalized experiences for our customers, to make our logistics system even more efficient.

We have an applied AI research lab at DoorDash, which is a team that is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This team is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. We operate with a flat structure - everyone is expected to be hands-on and contribute directly to the mission. Initiative and consistent delivery are how people grow and lead here.

## About the Role

You'll work directly with our cofounder with direct ownership over the direction of AI research at DoorDash. In this role you will develop realistic agent environments and evaluation methods, design systems and algorithms to improve agent performance, and collect and curate human and synthetic data to improve the capability and behavior of agent systems. This is hands-on work with immediate product impact at real-world scale.

• Work directly with leadership and see your research deployed at real-world scale - small team, massive reach.
• Move fast without bureaucracy - rapid iteration, high autonomy, and no layers of politics.
• Have access to global data scale, robust compute, and a platform primed for AI transformation.
• Shape how AI transforms commerce, building intelligent and adaptive experiences for millions of Consumers, Merchants, and Dashers.

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

• Experience with the latest AI tools building AI products
• Familiarity with building agent solutions, including context management, defining evals, measuring performance
• Strong knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques
• Experience building infra for large-scale reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning
• Experience at frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind) or top AI startups.
• A builder mindset - you're energized by experimentation, move quickly, and stay close to the work
• Strong cross-functional instincts and a natural ability to bring research and product teams together.
• Nice to have: PhD with AI or other scientific domains

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

How it works: Gem 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 Gem 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 and applicable state laws. In compliance with New York City Local Law 144, the independent bias audit summary for Gem is publicly available for review at our Careers Page.

Compensation

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).

$203,500—$299,300 USD

## About DoorDash