Member of Technical Staff, Applied AI Research
at DoorDash
Location
San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale, CA
Compensation
$204k–$299k USD
Type
full time
Posted
4 months ago
Remote
Yes
Market range · company + function + seniority
$173k—$200k—$247k
p25 · target · p75 · n=15
Posted $299k · well above market
Posting health
Aging · 65- ·Open 139 days
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Job description
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.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will…
- 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
About the Team
The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The teams are responsible for understanding Product Engineering’s evolving needs and developing platform and infrastructure capabilities to serve them. The team currently supports CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka and Redis as well as data abstraction services to reduce the complexity of interacting with storage systems for Product Engineers.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Data Solutions Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database agnostic abstractions. In this role, you will design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems, ensuring high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance.
You’ll serve as a hands-on architect and technical partner to product engineering and infrastructure teams, helping translate complex business requirements into resilient and scalable data models. Your work will directly influence the evolution of Taulu, DoorDash’s unified storage abstraction layer, by shaping best practices and identifying platform gaps through real world engagements.
This is a high-impact, cross functional role that combines deep technical expertise with a customer centric approach. You’ll lead solutioning engagements from design through production, drive the adoption of Taulu modeling best practices, and ensure that our systems meet goals around reliability, cost efficiency, and velocity. You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity.
You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…
- Design and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant distributed database solutions using Taulu, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and other paved path storage solutions.
- Architect and optimize multi-region, globally distributed systems to meet our high standards for availability, latency, and throughput.
- Lead data modeling, performance tuning, and capacity planning for large-scale, mission-critical storage workloads.
- Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved path storage solutions.
- Serve as the DRI for solutioning engagements, owning modeling in Taulu from experimentation through launch and scale.
- Shape the evolution of Taulu by identifying abstraction gaps and converting customer feedback into platform improvements.
- Apply workload-aware design patterns, including caching strategies, partitioning, and consistency tuning to improve performance and efficiency.
- Drive adoption of operational best practices across observability, schema design, capacity planning, and cost optimization across storage systems.
- Promote clarity and continuity by contributing to solutioning playbooks, decision logs, and architectural documentation.
We’re excited about you because…
- You have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed data systems, with deep expertise in NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra, DynamoDB, or ScyllaDB.
- You have a strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery.
- You’ve led data modeling efforts for high-throughput, low-latency workloads and understand the real-world trade-offs involved in NoSQL schema design.
- You are experienced with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and know how to layer them effectively over storage systems to optimize for performance and cost.
- You have a customer-first mindset, and thrive when working closely with product and platform teams to translate complex requirements into clean, scalable data models.
- You are skilled at communicating complex architecture decisions and building alignment across infrastructure and product engineering organizations.
- You have a track record of mentoring engineers, influencing data architecture at scale, and fostering best practices in reliability, observability, and data access patterns.
- You document decisions, share learnings, and take pride in contributing to reusable playbooks and durable frameworks for others to build upon.
- Bonus: You’ve worked on or contributed to open-source distributed databases.
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
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
About DoorDash
At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started by enabling door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known as the place you order food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods.
DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits and perks including premium healthcare, wellness expense reimbursement, paid parental leave and more.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.
Statement of Non-Discrimination: In keeping with our beliefs and goals, no employee or applicant will face discrimination or harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital/domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or veteran status. Above and beyond discrimination and harassment based on “protected categories,” we also strive to prevent other subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (i.e., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our office. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to 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 to Applicants for Jobs Located in NYC or Remote Jobs Associated With Office in NYC Only
We used Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provided Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023. We resumed using Covey Scout for Inbound again on June 29, 2024, and ceased using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 30, 2026.
The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor. Results of the audit may be viewed here: https://getcovey.com/nyc-local-law-144.
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