Software Engineer, ML Serving Platform

DoorDash USA; San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle (CA, CA, WA); On-site; USD 131,000 - 192,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grants

401(k) with employer matching

Paid parental leave (16 weeks)

Medical, dental and vision benefits

Paid time off

Paid sick leave

11 paid holidays

Job summary

DoorDash seeks an experienced software engineer to advance the ML serving platform. You will connect request routing with model inference on CPU/GPU, tackle latency and scale challenges, and deliver self-service tooling for internal modelers and teams.

You will own projects end-to-end, collaborating with engineering teams to translate evolving modeling needs into reliable, scalable production features while embracing open-source innovations.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of software engineering experience building production services.
• Strong CS fundamentals and proficiency in a backend language (Java, Kotlin, Go, C++, or Python).
• Understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, networking, timeouts, and performance trade-offs.
• Ability to design, implement, test, and roll out production infrastructure.
• Experience debugging production systems using operational data to improve reliability.
• Collaborates with customers and partners to make infrastructure easier to adopt.
• Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own defined projects from design through testing, rollout, and production support.
• Build tools, APIs, and workflows to deploy and operate models at scale.
• Improve routing, feature retrieval, and model execution for tens of millions of predictions per second.
• Evolve disaggregated serving architecture to scale with workloads.
• Improve Kubernetes deployment and autoscaling to meet latency and availability.
• Develop integrations and validation tooling for easy adoption.
• Monitor performance with benchmarking, profiling, and tracing; contribute to runbooks.

Skills

2+ years software engineering

Backend/Systems programming

Java

Kotlin

Go

C++

Python

Distributed systems

Debug production systems

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale, CA; Seattle, WA

About the Team

DoorDash’s ML Serving Platform delivers tens of millions of predictions per second, powering search, recommendations, advertising, delivery estimates, and logistics across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo.

Our customers are modelers and engineering teams across our internal business verticals. We build self-serve infrastructure that empowers them to bring new models into production, adopt open source software and models, and expand what they can accomplish with machine learning at scale.

We work at the intersection of a rapidly evolving open source ecosystem and demanding production workloads. With active customer demand and growing modeling ambitions, we’re advancing the infrastructure behind today’s predictions while building the capabilities that enable the next generation of ML innovation.

About the Role

You’ll help build the next generation of our ML serving platform, connecting request routing and online feature retrieval with model inference on CPU and GPU infrastructure. You’ll tackle challenging infrastructure problems involving latency, reliability, resource efficiency, and scale, and make those capabilities accessible through self-serve tools and workflows.

Working alongside experienced platform engineers, you’ll own defined projects from technical design and implementation through testing, rollout, and production support. You’ll partner directly with internal teams to understand emerging modeling requirements, remove adoption barriers, and turn advances in open source technology into measurable production improvements.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Empower modelers through self-serve infrastructure. Build tools, APIs, and workflows that help internal teams deploy, configure, validate, and operate models independently, accelerating ML adoption across business verticals.
• Bring open source innovation into production. Evaluate and integrate evolving inference frameworks and enable open source models, translating promising capabilities into reliable, efficient services at scale.
• Solve demanding inference infrastructure problems. Improve the systems that route prediction requests, retrieve online features, and execute models on a platform serving tens of millions of predictions per second.
• Help evolve our disaggregated serving architecture. Build modular components that allow routing, feature retrieval, and model execution to evolve and scale independently as workloads and modeling requirements change.
• Improve Kubernetes deployment and autoscaling. Help workloads respond to changing traffic while meeting latency and availability requirements and using CPU and GPU resources efficiently.
• Make adoption and rollout easier. Build integrations, validation, and migration tooling that help teams adopt new serving capabilities and our unified global platform with confidence.
• Own performance and reliability in production. Use benchmarking, profiling, metrics, and tracing to identify bottlenecks; participate in on-call and improve automation and runbooks to make the platform easier to operate.

We’re excited about you because…

• You have 2+ years of software engineering experience building and maintaining production services or infrastructure.
• You have strong computer science fundamentals and proficiency in a backend or systems programming language such as Java, Kotlin, Go, C++, or Python.
• You understand distributed systems fundamentals, including concurrency, networking, timeouts, failure handling, and performance trade-offs.
• You enjoy challenging infrastructure problems and can independently turn a defined problem into a technical design, tested implementation, and safe production rollout.
• You have experience debugging production systems and using operational data to improve reliability, performance, or cost.
• You care about the engineers using your platform and collaborate effectively with customers and partners to make complex infrastructure easier to adopt.
• You hold a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or have equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ML inference infrastructure, online feature retrieval, or other latency-sensitive distributed services.
• Experience operating containerized workloads on Kubernetes, including deployment, resource management, or autoscaling.
• Experience building self-serve developer platforms, APIs, or automation that helps other engineers move faster.
• Experience integrating open source infrastructure or models and validating their behavior under production workloads.
• Familiarity with CPU/GPU performance profiling, inference runtimes, or model deployment workflows.

Applications for this position are accepted on an ongoing basis

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.

$130,600 - $192,000 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.

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Voluntary Self-Identification

As described in our Applicant Privacy Notice, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in DoorDash’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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