Research Operations Manager

DoorDash USA; San Francisco, Sunnyvale, New York (CA, CA, NY); On-site; USD 209,000 - 307,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with employer matching

16 weeks paid parental leave

Wellness benefits

Paid time off & sick leave

Medical, dental, vision benefits

Job summary

DoorDash, Inc. is seeking a Research Operations Manager in San Francisco, CA to be the operational backbone of its research team. You will own systems, tools, vendors, and AI-powered processes to bring authentic customer voices into product decisions at scale.

You'll lead vendor management, budgeting, and participant recruitment, while championing experimentation and scalable research operations across brands and regions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in research operations, UX operations, or a closely related role.
• Experience managing contractors or full-time employees, including setting priorities, providing feedback, supporting development, and ensuring delivery.
• Demonstrated experience managing research vendors and procurement processes.
• Experience owning and forecasting operational or project budgets.
• Experience with research repositories and recruiting platforms (UserTesting, Qualtrics, etc.)
• Familiarity with prompt engineering or working with LLMs in a research or operations context.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of research vendor relationships from sourcing to performance review.
• Manage the research team's budget, forecast needs, and allocate resources for high-impact work.
• Lead participant recruiting across studies, manage panels and vendors, and build faster recruiting systems.
• Partner with researchers and engineering to evaluate and scale AI-based tooling for research workflows.
• Foster a culture of experimentation with lightweight processes and shared frameworks.
• Design and maintain scalable research operations infrastructure across brands/regions.

Skills

Vendor management

Budget forecasting

Recruiting knowledge

LLM tooling

Systems thinking

Stakeholder influence

Process optimization

Tools

UserTesting

Qualtrics

Job description

San Francisco, CA ; Sunnyvale, CA; New York, NY

About the Team

DoorDash’s mission is to grow and empower local economies. By building intelligent, last-mile delivery technology for local cities, DoorDash connects people with the local businesses they care about — helping grow businesses and the communities that support those businesses. At DoorDash, there are three audiences that are at the core of every decision we make - our Consumers, Merchants, and Couriers. The Research team has a direct link to uncover the unmet needs and pain points of each of these audiences. We bring their voices into the business in order to help set the strategic vision for all of DoorDash’s current and future products.

About the Role

We're looking for a Research Operations Manager to be the operational backbone of our research team, and a driving force behind DoorDash's commitment to customer obsession. Every great product decision starts with a real voice: a Dasher, a merchant, a customer. You'll own the systems, tools, vendors, and AI-powered processes that get those voices in front of the people building for them, faster and at greater scale. You'll also champion a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement, so the research practice keeps getting better along with our understanding of the people we serve. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of research, operations, and technology, built for someone who sees friction before it's surfaced and treats it as theirs to solve.

What You'll Do

Vendor & Procurement Management: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of research vendor relationships — from sourcing and evaluation through contract negotiation, onboarding, and ongoing performance review. You'll manage relationships with research tool providers, recruiting agencies, transcription and analysis services, and other third-party partners. You'll establish clear SLAs, hold vendors accountable, and continuously evaluate the market for better options.

Budget Management:Own the research team's budget: track spend, forecast needs, manage purchase orders, and ensure resources are allocated to the highest-impact work. You'll build visibility and reporting so research leaders can make informed investment decisions, and you'll identify opportunities to optimize spend without sacrificing research quality.

Participant Recruiting Lead the strategy and execution of participant recruiting across studies — managing panels, recruiting vendors, and internal databases to ensure the team has access to the right participants at the right time. You'll develop screeners, coordinate scheduling, manage incentives and compliance, and build systems that make recruiting faster and less effort-intensive for researchers.

AI-Powered Research Tooling: Partner with researchers, engineering, design to evaluate, build, maintain, and scale AI-based tools that accelerate the research process, from automated synthesis and analysis pipelines to intelligent tagging, search, and knowledge management. You'll bring a practical, iterative approach: shipping tools that solve real problems, gathering feedback, and improving them over time.

Culture of Experimentation Be a visible champion for experimentation within the research team. This means creating the conditions (psychological safety, lightweight processes, shared frameworks) that make it easy for researchers to try new methods, tools, and approaches. You'll run retrospectives, document and share learnings, and help the team build an institutional memory around what works.

Operations & Scalability Design and maintain the operational infrastructure that keeps the research practice running smoothly: research repositories, documentation standards, onboarding materials, team rituals, and the tooling stack. As the team and its ambitions grow, you'll proactively identify bottlenecks and build solutions before they become problems. You will also partner across brands/regions to extend research operations infrastructure globally, adapting for local legal and market requirements.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience in research operations, UX operations, or a closely related role
• Experience managing contractors or full-time employees, including setting priorities, providing feedback, supporting development, and ensuring delivery
• Demonstrated experience managing research vendors and procurement processes
• Experience owning and forecasting operational or project budgets
• Experience with research repositories and recruiting platforms (UserTesting, Qualtrics, etc.)
• Familiarity with prompt engineering or working with LLMs in a research or operations context. You don't need to code, but you're excited to build tools using AI and have strong intuitions about what to build and when
• A systems thinker who can zoom out to see inefficiencies and zoom in to fix them
• Strong communicator who can influence without authority and build trust across research, product, and engineering teams
• High degree of self-direction. You spot problems before they're surfaced to you and move quickly to address them

Why This Role

Research Operations is often the difference between a research team that produces insights and one that produces impact. In this role, you'll have real ownership, a team that values your craft, and the opportunity to shape how a research practice operates at scale, including on the frontier of AI-assisted research.

Why You’ll Love Working at DoorDash

We are leaders – Leadership is not limited to our management team. It’s something everyone at DoorDash embraces and embodies.

We are operators – We believe the only way to predict the future is to build it. Creating solutions to lead our company and our industry is what we do on every project, every day.

We are learners – Everyone here is continually learning on the job, no matter if we’ve been in a role for one year or one minute. We are committed to learning and implementing what is best for our customers, merchants, and dashers.

We are one team – The magic of DoorDash is our people, together making our inspiring goals attainable and driving us to greater heights.

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.

$208,800 - $307,000 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 Regarding Use of AI and Automated Tools: To streamline our hiring process, DoorDash utilizes an automated recruitment tool called Metaview.

How it works:Metaview 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 Metaview 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.