Software Engineer, Machine Learning Platform - Gen AI

DoorDash, Inc.; San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle (CA, CA, WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with employer matching

Parental leave (16 weeks)

Wellness benefits

Commuter benefits match

Paid time off

Job summary

DoorDash’s GenAI Platform team builds shared infrastructure to enable GenAI-powered products across teams. You’ll own the open-weights serving stack, real-time GPU endpoints, batch inference, and fine-tuning pipelines, while focusing on cost and performance tradeoffs.

You will collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, and platform teams to turn GenAI capabilities into durable platform primitives with strong reliability and observability.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 3+ years of industry software engineering experience.
• Strong backend fundamentals and distributed systems knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Build production infrastructure for GenAI platforms and APIs.
• Develop real-time GPU serving and high-throughput batch inference.
• Implement model fine-tuning pipelines (SFT/DPO/LoRA) and observability.
• Ensure latency, cost, and reliability targets with scalable design.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Production services

APIs

Data pipelines

ML infrastructure

Observability

Cost optimization

LLM inference

Model fine-tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

MS/PhD preferred

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

GPU clusters

Job description

About the Team

DoorDash’s GenAI Platform team sits within Machine Learning Platform and builds the shared infrastructure that helps DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo teams safely bring GenAI-powered products, agents, automation, and personalization to production. Our mission is to increase the velocity of business impact from GenAI. A central pillar of that work is running frontier open-weight LLMs and VLMs (such as GLM, Qwen, Kimi, and DeepSeek) ourselves — real-time GPU serving, high-throughput batch inference, and fine-tuning on autoscaling GPUs — delivering large cost and latency wins (for example, a billion embeddings produced roughly 20× cheaper and visual models served roughly 72% cheaper). We also own core platform surfaces including the LLM Gateway, Agent Gateway, evals infrastructure, guardrails, and cost attribution.

About the Role

You will join a small, high-leverage team building production infrastructure for Generative AI at DoorDash, with a primary focus on our open-weights model platform spanning inference and fine-tuning: real-time GPU serving, high-throughput batch inference, and model fine-tuning. You’ll work across model serving and inference engines, fine-tuning and training pipelines, GPU autoscaling and utilization, batch pipelines, backend services, and observability. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys pushing the cost/performance frontier of GPU inference and fine-tuning in a fast-moving technical area where product needs, model capabilities, vendor ecosystems, and cost/performance tradeoffs are evolving quickly.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

Build the infrastructure that helps DoorDash teams move GenAI ideas from prototype to production, increasing the velocity of business impact from AI across the company. Work on our open-weights serving stack — real-time GPU endpoints, high-throughput batch inference, and fine-tuning (SFT/DPO/LoRA) — alongside the LLM Gateway, Agent Gateway, evals infrastructure, guardrails, and cost attribution. Design scalable, high-performance systems for model serving, batch inference, GPU autoscaling, and fine-tuning that power real customer and internal automation use cases. Push the cost and latency frontier of GPU inference — turning batch jobs that took days into hours and cutting inference cost by multiples — while giving product teams a clean choice across open-weight and closed-source models with reliability, fallback, observability, and cost controls built in. Build platforms that support rapid experimentation while meeting production standards for latency, scale, monitoring, SLOs, playbooks, and operational excellence. Partner closely with ML engineers, product engineers, data scientists, and platform teams across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo to turn emerging GenAI capabilities into durable platform primitives. Shape the future of DoorDash’s centralized GenAI platform — including emerging directions such as reinforcement learning (RLHF/RLVR), agent optimization, and other post-training and agentic techniques — enabling the next generation of AI-powered products, agents, automation, and personalization.

We’re excited about you because…

B.S., M.S., or PhD. in Computer Science or equivalent 3+ years of industry experience in software engineering Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python and distributed systems. Experience building production services, APIs, data pipelines, or ML infrastructure at scale. Experience operating systems in production, including observability, debugging, reliability, incident response, and performance/cost optimization. Hands‑on experience with LLM inference and/or fine‑tuning of open-weight models in production — serving (latency, throughput, batching, autoscaling, GPU utilization) and/or fine‑tuning (SFT/DPO/LoRA). Ability to work across ambiguous, fast‑moving technical areas and turn customer use cases into reusable platform capabilities 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

Nice To Haves

• Experience with LLM inference engines and serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) in production
• Experience with distributed/multi-node fine‑tuning and training pipelines (SFT, DPO/RLHF, LoRA), including data preparation and evaluation
• GPU performance work — multi‑node/distributed inference, KV‑cache/memory optimization, quantization (FP8/INT8/AWQ/GPTQ), or cold‑start/throughput tuning
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), GPUs, serverless/elastic GPU platforms (e.g., Modal), or high-throughput batch systems
• Experience with LLM gateways, model routing, vendor abstraction, or cost attribution
• Experience building developer platforms, internal platforms, or self‑serve infrastructure
• Experience building and deploying AI agents or MCP servers in production
• Experience with eval systems, LLM observability, tracing, RAG, search, or vector databases

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.

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