Senior/Staff Deep Reinforcement Learning Engineer

About the Team

Our DD Labs team builds real-time autonomous delivery systems. The Planning & Decision-Making group is investing heavily in deep reinforcement learning to move beyond classical planning, learning policies that generalize across novel driving scenarios, handle long-tail edge cases, and improve continuously from large-scale fleet data. Our models jointly handle prediction and planning in a single unified architecture. Our stack is pure JAX end-to-end: the same code you train with is the code that runs on the robot. No C++ rewrites, no TensorRT export. A new policy goes from training to on-vehicle deployment in minutes.

About the Role

As a Senior/Staff Deep RL Engineer, you will design, train, and deploy deep reinforcement learning policies that make real-time driving decisions for our autonomous vehicles. You will own the full lifecycle, from problem formulation and reward design through large-scale distributed training to on-vehicle inference. You'll help define how learned components compose with the rest of the autonomy stack to produce robust, shippable behavior.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Formulate complex driving tasks as RL problems with well-shaped reward functions and expressive state/action representations.
• Design and train model-based deep RL agents using GPU-accelerated simulation at massive scale, including improving the simulator itself.
• Build and maintain distributed training infrastructure in JAX across large compute clusters.
• Build agentic optimization systems that automatically improve code, run experiments, analyze metrics, and iterate on RL policies with minimal human intervention.

We’re excited about you because…

• BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field, with a strong foundation in reinforcement learning and deep learning.
• Hands-on experience training RL agents at scale, ideally in robotics, autonomous driving, or other real-time decision-making domains.
• Proficiency in JAX or a similar functional ML framework; comfort with JIT compilation, vectorized environments, and GPU-accelerated simulation.
• Deep grasp of core RL concepts: policy gradients, value functions, exploration-exploitation, model-based RL, reward shaping, and sim-to-real transfer.
• Data-driven mindset: comfortable building experiment pipelines, analyzing training runs, and letting metrics guide architectural decisions.

Nice to Have

• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA) on RL or learned planning.
• Experience building or working with GPU-accelerated simulators for RL training.
• Track record of shipping a learned component in a production robotics or autonomous vehicle stack.

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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 range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

$168,000—$247,000 USD

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.