Associate Manager, AI Research Lab Strategy & Operations

About the Team

AI Research Lab is one of DoorDash’s frontier innovation hubs, focused on building the foundation for an AI-native future across our three core audiences: consumers, merchants, and dashers. As AI capabilities accelerate, the AI Research Lab operates at the center of technical exploration and real-world execution — connecting frontier model research, internal platform investments, operator teams, and strategic external partners.

Our mission is to translate cutting-edge AI research into scalable, production-ready systems that drive measurable business impact. We combine deep technical rigor with strong operational execution to ensure that breakthrough capabilities become durable competitive advantages for DoorDash.

About the Role

As an Associate Manager, Strategy & Operations on our AI Research Lab, you will play a central role in converting frontier AI advancements into shipped products and scalable infrastructure. You will operate across research, product, and operations to move from early discovery and experimentation to deployment and impact.

This role sits at the intersection of customer insight, technical innovation, and business execution. You will help define and scale the Lab’s most important bets while building the foundations that enable AI applications to compound over time.

You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will …

Reimagining core experiences through AI, such as the merchant journey, by partnering directly with in-field merchants, sales, support, product, and engineering teams. You will help unify major initiatives into a coherent, AI-native interaction model.

Own revenue-driving AI initiatives, operating as the accountable business owner for high-priority AI bets and ensuring clear linkage between technical progress and financial outcomes.

Lead business planning cycles, developing go-to-market strategies for AI-powered products and capabilities, overseeing execution through structured project plans, resource allocation, and KPI tracking.

Develop new business metrics and measurement frameworks, including:

Defining what should be measured and why

Establishing performance thresholds using data-driven benchmarking

Localizing metrics across geographies and market types

Driving AI adoption across DoorDash by enabling non-technical teams with enterprise tools, workflows, and experimentation sandboxes that integrate AI into daily operations.

Building scalable AI foundations, including evaluation datasets, guardrails, monitoring systems, and strategies for custom foundation models that ensure safety, reliability, and long-term leverage.

Operationalizing frontier technologies from external partners, translating research breakthroughs into revenue-generating product capabilities and production systems.

Leading rapid experimentation cycles, validating product-market fit, measuring business impact, and ensuring AI initiatives translate into tangible outcomes.

This role requires an entrepreneurial leader who thrives in ambiguity and can bridge technical depth with structured execution. You should be comfortable engaging directly with merchants, collaborating with engineers on model evaluation strategies, structuring strategic AI partnerships, and diving into metrics to diagnose performance.

We’re excited about you because…

Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of experience in finance, management consulting, business operations, business analytics, or high-growth/early-stage startup environments

Exceptional communicator and operator who can partner directly with in-field merchants, sales, and support teams to uncover workflow pain points, translate them into AI-native product opportunities, and drive adoption across internal stakeholders

Strong analytical thinker who thrives in ambiguity and 0-to-1 environments — able to extract clear, actionable recommendations and measurement frameworks out of fast-moving, frontier-AI research and bring structure to unstructured problems

Hands-on experience leveraging AI tooling (Claude Codex, Codex, Cursor etc) in day-to-day work to accelerate discovery, prototype workflows, build eval datasets, and test hypotheses faster than traditional product cycles allow

Direct experience productizing LLM/ML systems (shipping features, building eval datasets, or running model-performance feedback loops) is a strong plus

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.

$124,000 — $155,000 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.