Senior/Staff Deep Reinforcement Learning Engineer - DoorDash Dot

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.
• You have proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software
• 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.

Notice Regarding Use of AI and Automated Tools: To streamline our hiring process, DoorDash utilizes an automated recruitment tool called Gem.

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