Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure - Generative AI
DoorDash · San Francisco, United States +2 · 2mo ago
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, leading the design and architecture of our open-weights model platform spanning inference and fine-tuning: real-time GPU serving, high-throughput batch inference, and model fine-tuning. You’ll set technical direction across model serving and inference engines, fine-tuning and training pipelines, GPU autoscaling and utilization, batch pipelines, backend services, and observability, and mentor engineers as you go. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who enjoys owning ambiguous, high-impact systems and 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…
- Lead the design of infrastructure that helps DoorDash teams move GenAI ideas from prototype to production, increasing the velocity of business impact from AI across the company.
- Own and evolve 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.
- Architect 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 — and raise the technical bar for — ML engineers, product engineers, data scientists, and platform teams across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo to turn emerging GenAI capabilities into durable platform primitives.
- Set technical direction for 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
- 6+ years of industry experience in software engineering
- Deep backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python and distributed systems.
- Track record of designing and owning 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.
- Deep 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).
- Demonstrated technical leadership: leading design across ambiguous, fast-moving technical areas, mentoring engineers, and turning 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
Notice Regarding Use of AI and Automated Tools: To streamline our hiring process, DoorDash utilizes an automated recruitment tool called Gem.
How it works: Gem assists our recruiting team by evaluating job related qualifications and characteristics in connection with hiring. The tool is designed and used to support - rather than replace - human decision-making; trained personnel make final decisions with meaningful human review and oversight, and DoorDash does not use Gem or other AI-enabled tool in a manner that has the effect of subjecting applicants or employees to discrimination based on any protected characteristic or proxy or for engaging in any protected activity under applicable law.
Data Retention, Privacy & Bias Audit: Data collected during this process is retained in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy and applicable state laws. In compliance with New York City Local Law 144, the independent bias audit summary for Gem is publicly available for review at our Careers Page.
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 ranges for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.
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.
Notice to Applicants for Jobs Located in NYC or Remote Jobs Associated With Office in NYC Only
We used Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provided Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023. We resumed using Covey Scout for Inbound again on June 29, 2024, and ceased using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 30, 2026.
The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor. Results of the audit may be viewed here: https://getcovey.com/nyc-local-law-144.
Beware of recruitment scams: DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Wolt will never ask you to pay money or share sensitive financial information during hiring — learn more about our legitimate recruiting process at Recruitment Scam Awareness - DoorDash .