AI Research Fellowship, (Summer and Fall 2026)

🏢 Doordashusa · 📍 San Francisco, CA 💰 $16,000 - $16,000 / yr

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Position Summary & Responsibilities

About the Team

The DoorDash Research Fellowship is a 3-month program (extendable to 6 months) looking for Summer and Fall 2026 cohorts, for researchers and engineers who want to work on the hardest applied ML and AI problems in local commerce. Fellows are given the resources, autonomy, and access to real-world operational data needed to pursue ambitious research directions — with the goal of producing work that influences both the field and how DoorDash operates at scale.

This program is modeled on the best external research fellowships: fellows are treated as independent researchers, not as junior employees on a product team. You pick the problem (within a set of priority areas), you own the direction, and you publish or ship the outcome.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will receive…

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 a

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Doordashusa Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Evaluators strictly test extreme operational grit, data-driven hustle, and a willingness to roll up sleeves to solve hyper-local logistics challenges.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Sounding too precious or above getting into the weeds of operational execution.
2. Failing to back up strategic proposals with immediate cohort and margin metrics.
3. Lack of speed or urgency in problem-solving responses.

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I've scaled high-velocity operations by obsessing over the unit economics of every local transaction, and I'm ready to build the next layer of logistical density for DoorDash.

🔒 Free Candidate Preparation Access

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Apply for AI Research Fellowship, (Summer and Fall 2026)

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