Senior Machine Learning Engineer, New Verticals Agentic Foundations

DoorDash is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help build and improve agentic foundations for vertical agents.

Responsibilities

• Own continuous improvement of flagship agents, starting with the Ask Assistant, using an eval-driven loop to increase speed, cost-efficiency, and reliability for customers.
• Transfer the eval-driven approach to new agentic experiences for Merchants and Dashers, converting promising concepts into production-ready agents.
• Build and refine an eval harness and optimization loop to identify failure modes, then iterate on prompts, tools, skills, and context while measuring impact on real customer tasks.
• Run rigorous experiments, including fine-tuning open-weights models and deploying small language models (SLMs) to replace or augment larger LLMs where applicable.
• Identify agentic opportunities for Merchants and Dashers from early exploration through production delivery.
• Collaborate on agentic memory, agent-compatible product representations, and post-training SLMs for steerable generative recommendation, and help bring these capabilities into production agents.
• Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to define an ML-driven strategy for DoorDash’s fast-growing grocery and retail delivery business.

Requirements

• 3+ years of industry machine learning experience, including hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents (tool use, context management, prompting, guardrails) and improving them using 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; ability to make quality, latency, and cost trade-offs.
• Strong foundation in NLP and machine learning; proficiency in Python with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• M.S. or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Math, or another quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience; collaborative, growth-minded approach with a drive for measurable impact.

Technologies

• Python
• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• SFT
• Preference optimization
• RL

Benefits

• Premium healthcare
• Wellness expense reimbursement
• Paid parental leave

About the Team

• Agentic Foundations, part of New Verticals ML, builds core AI/ML intelligence powering high-quality, scalable agents at DoorDash.
• Proves capabilities through flagship agent experiences, including the Ask grocery assistant.
• Operates a closed loop: new models, evals, and representations improve agents, while real-world usage surfaces gaps that guide next foundations work.

Role Details

• Location: Seattle, WA (hybrid)
• Compensation: USD 167,800 - 246,800 per year
• Reporting line: engineering lead on the New Verticals AI/ML team
• Work style: hybrid with some time in-office and some time remote

Notice to applicants for NYC or remote jobs associated with an office in NYC: DoorDash used Covey as part of hiring and/or promotional processes for certain NYC roles, where some features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. Job requirements were provided to Covey and candidate applications were submitted. Covey Scout for Inbound ran from August 21, 2023 through December 21, 2023, resumed on June 29, 2024, and ceased on April 30, 2026. The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor; results may be viewed at https://getcovey.com/nyc-local-law-144. Beware of recruitment scams: DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Wolt will never ask you to pay money or share sensitive financial information during hiring.