AI Research Fellowship, (Summer and Fall 2026)

DoorDash is a technology and logistics company focused on empowering local economies. They are seeking researchers and engineers for their AI Research Fellowship to tackle applied ML and AI problems in local commerce, providing resources and real-world data for impactful research.

Responsibilities

• Pick the problem (within a set of priority areas) and own the direction
• Publish or ship the outcome of research work
• Propose research directions and work across priority areas such as reinforcement learning, agentic systems, and multimodal understanding
• Engage in a core research period with regular check-ins, internal talks, and working sessions
• Complete a final write-up, internal presentation, and publication or productionization path

Skills

• You're a researcher with a strong track record — PhD candidates (rising 4th year or beyond), recent PhDs, or independent researchers with published work at top ML venues or equivalent demonstrated output
• You're an engineer with deep research instincts who have shipped ambitious ML or systems work and want dedicated time to pursue a research direction
• You can operate independently — set a research agenda, scope it, and execute without heavy supervision
• You have strong written and verbal communication; comfort presenting work to mixed research and engineering audiences

Benefits

• Dedicated compute allocation sized to the research agenda — GPU clusters for training and inference budgets for experimentation
• Full access to DoorDash's research infrastructure — our internal RL stack, training and evaluation pipelines, RL environments built on real operational systems, agent evaluation harnesses, and the tooling our own research teams use day-to-day. Fellows are first-class users, not sandboxed visitors.
• Access to DoorDash operational data — real-world datasets spanning logistics, merchant operations, consumer behavior, and marketplace dynamics, under appropriate data governance
• Research mentorship from senior researchers and engineering leaders at DoorDash, plus a named research sponsor for each fellow who meets with you weekly and is accountable for unblocking your work
• Speaker series featuring leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry — faculty from top ML programs, research leads from frontier AI labs, and senior operators from across tech. Fellows get dedicated 1:1 time with speakers when possible.
• A cohort of fellows working alongside you — a small, tight-knit group of researchers tackling different problems but sharing ideas, drafts, and reading groups. The community extends to DoorDash research alumni and the broader fellowship network.
• Publication support — fellows are encouraged to publish at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, etc.) and DoorDash will support the legal and review process
• Relocation support, housing stipend, and competitive pay
• Housing stipend
• Relocation stipend
• Wellness reimbursement benefit
• Access to an employee assistance program
• In-office lunch credits
• Premium healthcare
• Wellness expense reimbursement
• Paid parental leave

Company Overview

Company H1B Sponsorship