AI Research Fellowship, (Summer and Fall 2026)

DoorDash is a technology and logistics company that empowers local economies through delivery and marketplace services. The AI Research Fellowship is a 3-month program, extendable to 6 months, for researchers and engineers pursuing applied machine learning and artificial intelligence research in local commerce. Fellows independently define and execute research agendas, with opportunities to publish findings or productionize outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Kickoff (2 weeks, in-person in SF): Onboarding, scoping the research agenda with your sponsor, meeting teams across Research, ML Platform, and relevant product orgs
• Core research period (~10 weeks, hybrid from SF DoorDash office): Focused research work with regular check-ins, internal talks, and working sessions. Extension to 6 months decided at the midpoint based on research progress and mutual fit
• Closeout: Final write-up, internal presentation, and publication or productionization path
• Reinforcement learning environments for real-world operations — building high-fidelity simulators and training environments from operational data, including the tradeoffs between real-data fidelity and synthetic generalization
• Agentic systems for logistics and local commerce — long-horizon planning, tool use, and evaluation methodologies for agents operating in physical-world marketplaces
• Foundation models for marketplace dynamics — forecasting, pricing, matching, and personalization at marketplace scale
• Evaluation and measurement — new benchmarks and evaluation methods for ML systems deployed in messy, real-world operational settings
• Multimodal understanding — vision, speech, and language applied to merchant catalogs, operations, and consumer interfaces
• Set a research agenda, scope it, and execute without heavy supervision