Senior Machine Learning Engineer, New Verticals Agentic Foundations

The role

You will own the continuous improvement of flagship agents using an eval-driven loop. You will build and refine consumer agents and launch new agentic experiences for Merchants and Dashers.

What you will do

• Build and refine eval harness-optimization loop to pinpoint failure modes
• Iterate on prompts, tools, skills, and context
• Run rigorous experiments including fine-tuning open-weights models
• Deploy small language models (SLMs)
• Launch new agents for Merchants and Dashers from exploration to production
• Work on agentic memory, agent-compatible product representations, and post-training SLMs
• Partner with engineering, product, and business leaders to define ML-driven strategy

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of industry ML experience
• Hands-on work building and shipping LLM-based agents (tool use, context management, prompting, guardrails)
• Improving agents with evals and data
• Experience with post-training or fine-tuning of open-weights models (e.g., SFT, preference optimization, or RL)
• Strong foundation in NLP and machine learning
• Proficiency in Python
• Proficiency in frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• M.S. or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Math, or another quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

• Experience including small language models

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
• Equity grants

About the company

DoorDash is a technology and logistics company that started by enabling door-to-door delivery. The company aims to empower local economies and expand to provide any and all goods.