Senior ML Engineer - Real-Time Delivery & Logistics

DoorDash; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 137,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Paid parental leave (16 weeks)

Wellness benefits

Commuter benefits match

Paid time off

Job summary

DoorDash Drive powers deliveries placed through merchants' own channels—using DoorDash's logistics network. The Drive ML team builds prediction and intelligence systems for ETA, prep-time, and order release, delivering improvements across merchant, consumer, and dasher experiences.

The role owns ML systems end-to-end—from feature engineering to deployment, monitoring, and iteration—and collaborates with product, data science, and platform teams to scale new capabilities in production.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience building and shipping production machine learning systems with measurable business impact (Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD).
• Strong experience developing production machine learning models using modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and distributed data processing technologies such as Spark and Airflow.
• Experience building, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining production ML systems end-to-end.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience with modern ML infrastructure and tooling.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following areas: Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Optimization / Operations Research, Large Language Models (LLMs) or Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Experience applying machine learning to estimation, ranking, prediction, optimization, or decision-making problems at production scale.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs or VLMs is a strong plus.
• Experience in logistics, marketplaces, or delivery platforms is helpful but not required.
• Proficiency using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) throughout the software development lifecycle.
• You are located or are planning to relocate to San Francisco, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, or Seattle, WA.

Responsibilities

• Build next-generation machine learning models for delivery ETA, pickup ETA, merchant prep-time estimation, and order release prediction that improve reliability for merchants and consumers.
• Develop deep learning models that leverage large-scale spatiotemporal, marketplace, and behavioral signals to improve prediction accuracy.
• Apply reinforcement learning and optimization techniques to improve logistics decision-making, assignment strategies, and marketplace efficiency.
• Build AI-native product experiences using large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). For example, transform pickup photos, item verification flows, receipts, and drop-off images into structured quality signals that help verify orders, prevent delivery defects, and improve issue resolution.
• Design and run rigorous online experiments, production monitoring, and model iteration to continuously improve performance.
• Partner closely with software engineers, product managers, data scientists, and platform teams to bring new machine learning capabilities into production at scale.

Skills

PyTorch

Spark

Airflow

Python

LLMs

VLMs

Reinforcement Learning

Deep Learning

Optimization

Operations Research

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher

Tools

PyTorch

Spark

Airflow

Job description

DoorDash Drive powers deliveries placed through merchants' own channels—using DoorDash's logistics network. The Drive ML team builds prediction and intelligence systems for ETA, prep-time, and order release, delivering improvements across merchant, consumer, and dasher experiences.

The role owns ML systems end-to-end—from feature engineering to deployment, monitoring, and iteration—and collaborates with product, data science, and platform teams to scale new capabilities in production.