Senior Associate, New Verticals - Central Strategy & Analytics

Our New Verticals Strategy & Operations team is re-inventing the way consumers think about grocery, convenience, alcohol and retail delivery through both our first-party and third-party operations businesses. DashMarts are our first-party offering designed to provide on-demand deliveries by selling household essentials, groceries, brand-name favorites, local favorites and so much more. The end to end DashMart experience is powered through DoorDash. Third-party partnerships enable us to offer on-demand deliveries from both SMB and enterprise merchants across grocery, convenience alcohol and retail storefronts. The merchants own the inventory, we fulfill and deliver them! Our Central Operations team is the heartbeat of the New Verticals Strategy & Operations team that enables us to power a robust logistic platform through a high-quality, speedy and efficient network - for both DashMarts and third party partners.

The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The teams are responsible for understanding Product Engineering’s evolving needs and developing platform and infrastructure capabilities to serve them. The team currently supports CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka and Redis as well as data abstraction services to reduce the complexity of interacting with storage systems for Product Engineers.

We’re looking to hire a few Senior Associates within our Central Strategy & Operations that will help shape our strategy around delivery and labor efficiency, leveraging both operational and product levers to build logistics systems and frameworks.. This role sits at the intersection of strategy, analytics, and execution, with end-to-end ownership of key efficiency drivers and their impact on our business.

In this interview process, we will consider for you two roles that we have open and align a role fit based on interview feedback before the final round interview. Depending on which role you get aligned to, you may define and drive the strategy for delivery quality, Dasher earnings, and customer tipping—balancing a compelling earnings experience with affordability and strong unit economic to leading our labor efficiency strategy and planning for DashMart, developing the models, frameworks, and analyses that power operational excellence at scale.

Partnering cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Finance, you will translate complex data into actionable insights and initiatives that improve efficiency, elevate the customer experience, and strengthen our bottom line. You will play a critical role in designing new systems, optimizing existing operations, and ensuring we continuously improve as we grow.

This role requires strong ownership, strategic thinking, and analytical rigor. You will be responsible for driving initiatives from concept through execution, unlocking meaningful improvements that enhance both operational performance and user experience. You should be comfortable going deep in the data, setting a clear vision for performance, and mobilizing teams to deliver results. This is a highly visible role with outsized impact on customer experience, operational efficiency, and business performance.

We operate in a hybrid model - you will spend some time in your home office, in person via offsites and on-site in DashMarts as well. You will report into a Senior Manager on the role.

• Build. You’ll have your fingerprints all over DoorDash’s next big business. You’ll do whatever it takes to launch, get 1% better every day, and scale something completely new. This means everything from high-level strategy to nitty-gritty operational details.
• Test & implement. You will identify operational gaps, identify product features and test/scale those product builds in partnership with product & engineering.
• Experiment. You’ll transform strategies into operational experiments that create measurable and actionable outcomes, informing your larger initiative implementation plans.
• Analyze. You’ll assess the operational and financial impacts of your decisions, and iterate based on data.
• Strategize. You will own and deliver on improving key selection metrics. You’ll create and execute quarterly and annual strategic plans aligned with product capabilities to elevate order quality.
• Lead and collaborate. You’ll work with a cross-functional team, including local operations, engineering, and product

We’re hiring a Data Solutions Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database agnostic abstractions. In this role, you will design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems, ensuring high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance.

You’ll serve as a hands-on architect and technical partner to product engineering and infrastructure teams, helping translate complex business requirements into resilient and scalable data models. Your work will directly influence the evolution of Taulu, DoorDash’s unified storage abstraction layer, by shaping best practices and identifying platform gaps through real world engagements.

This is a high-impact, cross functional role that combines deep technical expertise with a customer centric approach. You’ll lead solutioning engagements from design through production, drive the adoption of Taulu modeling best practices, and ensure that our systems meet goals around reliability, cost efficiency, and velocity. You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity. 

• Design and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant distributed database solutions using Taulu, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and other paved path storage solutions. 
• Architect and optimize multi-region, globally distributed systems to meet our high standards for availability, latency, and throughput.
• Lead data modeling, performance tuning, and capacity planning for large-scale, mission-critical storage workloads.
• Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved path storage solutions.
• Serve as the DRI for solutioning engagements, owning modeling in Taulu from experimentation through launch and scale.
• Shape the evolution of Taulu by identifying abstraction gaps and converting customer feedback into platform improvements.
• Apply workload-aware design patterns, including caching strategies, partitioning, and consistency tuning to improve performance and efficiency.
• Drive adoption of operational best practices across observability, schema design, capacity planning, and cost optimization across storage systems.
• Promote clarity and continuity by contributing to solutioning playbooks, decision logs, and architectural documentation.

• You solve problems from first principles. You’re excited to solve problems in innovative ways, and you resist “this is how it’s always been done” thinking.
• You’re equally comfortable operating at 10,000 feet and 1 foot. You don’t hesitate to get in the weeds and operate at the lowest level of detail, but you’re just as comfortable thinking long-term and inspiring a team. No job is beneath you.
• You’re unafraid of ambiguity. Rapid change and learning is exciting to you, and you thrive in ambiguous, startup environments
• You’re analytical. You let data win arguments, and you’re comfortable pulling your own data in SQL or modeling in Excel. 
• You have 4-6+ years of professional experience. Ideally you have experience in product operations, logistics manufacturing, engineering or business operations. 
  • Bonus points if you have 2+ years of experience with physical retail, manufacturing, or warehousing environments. Experience in grocery warehousing or online micro-fulfillment centers is preferred.
• You have completed your BS/BA Degree preferably in Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain or a related field.

Applications for this position are accepted on an ongoing basis

• You have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed data systems, with deep expertise in NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra, DynamoDB, or ScyllaDB.
• You have a strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery.
• You’ve led data modeling efforts for high-throughput, low-latency workloads and understand the real-world trade-offs involved in NoSQL schema design.
• You are experienced with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and know how to layer them effectively over storage systems to optimize for performance and cost.
• You have a customer-first mindset, and thrive when working closely with product and platform teams to translate complex requirements into clean, scalable data models.
• You are skilled at communicating complex architecture decisions and building alignment across infrastructure and product engineering organizations.
• You have a track record of mentoring engineers, influencing data architecture at scale, and fostering best practices in reliability, observability, and data access patterns.
• You document decisions, share learnings, and take pride in contributing to reusable playbooks and durable frameworks for others to build upon.
• Bonus: You’ve worked on or contributed to open-source distributed databases.  

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