Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Personalization

📋 Job Overview

Come help us build the world's most reliable on-demand, logistics engine for last-mile retail delivery! We're looking for an experienced machine learning engineer to help us develop modern growth and personalization models that power DoorDash's growing retail and grocery business.

🏢 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.

🎯 The Role

We’re looking for a passionate Applied Machine Learning expert to join our team. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll be conceptualizing, designing, implementing, and validating algorithmic improvements to the growth and personalization experiences at the heart of our fast-growing grocery and retail delivery business.  You will use our robust data and machine learning infrastructure to implement new ML solutions to make the consumer search experience more relevant, seamless, and delightful across grocery, convenience, and many other retail categories. You will demonstrate a strong command of production level machine learning,  experience with solving end-user problems, and collaborate well with multi-disciplinary teams.

You will report into the engineering manager on our Personalization team. We expect this role to be hybrid with some time in-office and some time remote (#LI-Hybrid).

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Develop production machine learning solutions to build a world class personalized shopping experience for a diverse and expanding retail space
• Partner with engineering and product leaders to help shape the product roadmap applying ML
• Mentor junior team members, and lead cross functional pods to create collective impact

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience developing machine learning models with business impact, and shipping ML solutions to production. 
• Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software
• M.S., or PhD. in Statistics, Computer Science, Math, Operations Research, Physics, Economics, or other quantitative field
• Expertise in applied ML for Causal Inference and Recommendation Systems  -  both classical and deep learning based. Additional familiarity with explore/exploit/MAB algorithms & LLMs is a plus.  
• Machine learning background in Python; experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow preferred.
• Ability to communicate technical details to nontechnical stakeholders
• You keep the mission in mind, take ideas and help them grow using data and rigorous testing, show evidence of progress and then double down
• Desire for impact with a growth-minded and collaborative mindset

🎁 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.