Senior/Staff Deep Reinforcement Learning Engineer - DoorDash Dot

The role

You will design, train, and deploy deep reinforcement learning policies for autonomous vehicle driving decisions. You will manage the full lifecycle from problem formulation and reward design to large-scale distributed training and on-vehicle inference.

What you will do

• Formulate complex driving tasks as RL problems with well-shaped reward functions and expressive state/action representations.
• Design and train model-based deep RL agents using GPU-accelerated simulation at massive scale.
• Improve the simulator itself.
• Build and maintain distributed training infrastructure in JAX across large compute clusters.
• Build agentic optimization systems to automatically improve code, run experiments, analyze metrics, and iterate on RL policies.

Required qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field.
• Strong foundation in reinforcement learning and deep learning.
• Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle.
• Hands-on experience training RL agents at scale in robotics, autonomous driving, or other real-time decision-making domains.
• Proficiency in JAX or a similar functional ML framework.
• Comfort with JIT compilation, vectorized environments, and GPU-accelerated simulation.
• Deep grasp of core RL concepts: policy gradients, value functions, exploration-exploitation, model-based RL, reward shaping, and sim-to-real transfer.
• Data-driven mindset for building experiment pipelines and analyzing training runs.

Nice to have

• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA) on RL or learned planning.
• Experience building or working with GPU-accelerated simulators for RL training.
• Track record of shipping a learned component in a production robotics or autonomous vehicle stack.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with employer matching
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave
• Wellness benefits
• Commuter benefits match
• Paid time off
• Paid sick leave
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 11 paid holidays
• Disability and basic life insurance
• Family-forming assistance
• Mental health program

About the company

DoorDash is a technology and logistics company that started by enabling door-to-door delivery. The DD Labs team builds real-time autonomous delivery systems.