Product Manager Airspace & Autonomy - DoorDash Air
DoorDash · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About the Team
The DoorDash Air team is bringing drone delivery to reality. To make this happen, we’re building a strong electrical team to design high reliability, high power density converters, and fault-tolerant controls electronics. Come join us to build a new class of aircrafts and deploy at scale.
DoorDash Labs, established in 2018, serves as the innovation hub for DoorDash, focusing on developing automation and robotics solutions to enhance last-mile logistics. The team's mission is to create technologies that support and augment human networks, aiming to improve efficiency for Dashers, merchants, and consumers alike. We’re ruthlessly focused on business impact. We are a highly senior team composed of former pioneers from a variety of different robotics industries. As of 2025, DoorDash has completed 10B lifetime deliveries. We’re focused on how to do the next 10B even better.
About the Role
As the Product Manager Airspace & Autonomy for DoorDash Air’s Airspace and Autonomy capabilities, you will own the end-to-end product strategy for the software, services, autonomy, perception, human interfaces and related capabilities required to deploy autonomous drone delivery at scale.
You will connect DoorDash’s order and logistics platform with the aircraft, autonomy stack, mission-planning services, UTM capabilities, fleet-management tools, and operator workflows that execute each delivery. You will define how an order moves from merchant readiness through dispatch, airspace validation, autonomous flight, delivery, and completion within the broader DoorDash marketplace, ensuring that new features align to DoorDash Air’s roadmap across teams while balancing execution timelines against technical debt.
You will lead product direction across autonomy, aviation software, services, hardware, systems engineering, flight operations, UTM, safety, regulatory, data, and DoorDash platform teams. You will work closely with the Head of UTM and senior Engineering and Operations leaders to establish the product roadmap, clarify system boundaries, make build-versus-partner decisions, and align technical investment with operational scale and unit economics. You will also coach and mentor engineers to help them understand how their work contributes to the broader vision and enables safe and scalable drone delivery operations.
This is not a coordination-only role, nor is it purely an internally facing role. You will already have deep credibility in standards development organizations and will promote best practices to help ensure that DoorDash Air’s software, services and hardware meet technical standards required for regulatory compliance in the U.S. and abroad. You will set the vision, establish priorities, make informed technical and product tradeoffs, and hold cross-functional teams accountable for delivering an integrated drone delivery system.
You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…
- Own the end-to-end product strategy for DoorDash Air’s safety critical software, services and platform infrastructure. Define the long-term vision, platform architecture, capability roadmap, and investment priorities across aircraft, onboard software, cloud services, operational tooling, and DoorDash platform integrations.
- Integrate drone delivery into the DoorDash marketplace. Define how merchant preparation, order readiness, dispatch timing, routing, customer promises, delivery-zone eligibility, and fulfillment decisions interact with aircraft availability, weather, airspace, and operational constraints.
- Lead the autonomy product roadmap. Establish priorities across mission planning, autonomous path and motion planning, contingency behaviors, rerouting, detect-and-avoid integration, vehicle health, payload handling, landing and delivery behaviors, and remote assistance.
- Create the roadmap to progress from 1:1 to m:N operations. Define the incremental technical capabilities required to move from one operator supervising one aircraft toward increasingly autonomous multi-aircraft operations, including exception management, alert prioritization, task allocation, fleet orchestration, remote intervention, and human-autonomy interface design.
- Define the data strategy for autonomous aviation. Determine which geospatial, terrain, obstacle, weather, airspace, population-risk, connectivity, landing-zone, and operational data layers should be built internally, licensed, sourced through partners, or generated by the fleet.
- Build UTM and airspace-management capabilities. Lead product requirements for operational-volume generation, strategic and tactical deconfliction, dynamic rerouting, airspace authorization, constraint management, conformance monitoring, and interoperability with UTM service providers and public airspace systems.
- Lead standards compliance and engagement. Champion compliance with relevant standards — ASTM F3201 (software), F3548 and F3411 (UTM-specific functions) — across the airspace software roadmap and specs. Maintain an active leadership role in ASTM standards-development activities on behalf of DoorDash.
- Productize regulatory compliance. Translate Part 135 operating requirements, BVLOS approvals, safety cases, operational limitations, and emerging Part 108 concepts into reusable software, data, workflow, auditability, and configuration-management capabilities.
- Make build, buy, and partner decisions. Evaluate technology providers, data sources, autonomy components, and infrastructure partners based on strategic differentiation, integration complexity, operational risk, economics, and time to market.
- Define system-level success metrics. Work across the organization to establish instrumentation and KPIs across delivery success, order-to-dispatch time, route efficiency, intervention frequency, operator-to-aircraft ratio, aircraft utilization, mission completion, system availability, regulatory conformance, and cost per delivery.
- Connect technical investment to business outcomes. Develop business cases and sequencing recommendations that balance safety, customer experience, operational scalability, engineering effort, deployment speed, and long-term unit economics.
- Shape the technical organization. Identify the product, systems, autonomy, platform, data, hardware, test, and operational capabilities required to achieve the roadmap. Partner with functional leaders to define roles, close talent gaps, and build an organization capable of scaling beyond individual experts.
We’re excited about you because…
- 10+ years of product management, technical product leadership, systems leadership, or related experience, including significant responsibility for complex software or cyber-physical platforms.
- 5+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, UAS, aviation technology, safety-critical systems, or another highly regulated real-world operating environment.
- A demonstrated track record of taking technically complex products from early concept or prototype through validation, deployment, and operational scale.
- Experience owning products that span multiple layers of a technology stack, including embedded or vehicle software, cloud services, APIs, data infrastructure, operational applications, and hardware integration.
- Strong technical fluency across autonomous-system concepts such as mission planning, path planning, motion planning, perception, localization, guidance and control, behavior management, contingency handling, simulation, telemetry, and command and control.
- Experience defining product strategy and architecture for distributed, real-time, or mission-critical systems in which reliability, safety, and operational performance are fundamental product requirements.
- Working knowledge of UTM, airspace-management systems, geospatial data, flight-planning services, operational volumes, conformance monitoring, and airspace interoperability.
- Experience operating within or building technology for FAA-regulated environments, including familiarity with any combination of National Airspace System hardware/software/procedures, Part 107, Part 135, Part 108, Part 146, BVLOS operating approvals, UTM or USS services, and evolving autonomous-flight regulations.
- Experience designing or scaling human-supervised autonomy, remote operations, multi-vehicle systems, fleet orchestration, or m:N operating models.
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).
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.
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