Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Fulfillment Planning

📋 Job Overview

The Fulfillment Planning team builds the intelligence that powers DoorDash’s logistics network. We optimize how deliveries are planned and executed across the full delivery lifecycle, improving customer experience, merchant outcomes, Dasher efficiency, and DoorDash profitability. Our mission is to improve fulfillment quality while reducing fulfillment cost. We do this by applying machine learning, optimization, and systems engineering to the core decisions behind assignment, routing, batching, timing, and fulfillment estimation.

🏢 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.

🎯 The Role

We’re looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the design, development, and deployment of large-scale production ML systems that drive real-time decisioning across DoorDash’s fulfillment ecosystem.

You will start by owning ML systems for assignment and fulfillment estimation, partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Engineering, and Platform teams to improve delivery quality, cost, and efficiency. Over time, you may also contribute to adjacent areas such as batching, fulfillment execution, demand shaping, and logistics optimization across DoorDash’s business lines.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role for someone who enjoys building 0→1 ML systems, operating at Staff-level scope, and influencing technical direction across multiple teams. You will define architectures, set modeling and deployment standards, mentor other engineers, and help shape how DoorDash applies machine learning to logistics at scale.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own and build foundational ML systems that directly impact delivery quality, cost, and overall logistics efficiency across DoorDash.
• Work on challenging, real-world machine learning problems, including real-time assignment, routing, and fulfillment estimation.
• Lead 0→1 ML initiatives, defining how machine learning and optimization are applied across fulfillment products.
• Influence architecture, strategy, and execution for a Tier-0 service critical to DoorDash’s logistics platform.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Platform Engineering in a highly cross-functional environment.
• Establish best practices for model development, deployment, monitoring, retraining, and governance.
• Define and lead DoorDash’s cutting-edge AI vision for logistics: an LLM-inspired foundation model for intelligence across logistics
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar for logistics ML across the organization.

📌 Required Qualifications

• You have 8+ years of industry experience building and deploying production-scale machine learning systems.
• You have strong machine learning fundamentals and know how to apply them to large-scale production systems.
• You are fluent in Python
• You have hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks, especially deep learning frameworks.
• You have designed, launched, and operated mission-critical ML models or systems in production, including monitoring, retraining, reliability, and governance.
• You can lead complex technical projects end to end and influence stakeholders across multiple teams or organizations.
• You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces and turning 0→1 ideas into production systems.
• You have built or shipped large-scale ML models for recommendation, ads, marketplace, logistics, or other domains.
• You have experience with knowledge distillation from large teacher models into efficient production models.

🎁 Benefits

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).

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.