Director of Vertical Data Engineering
About The Position
DoorDash is looking for a Director of Vertical Data Engineering to lead the transformation of data engineering into an AI-ready data product organization. You will partner with ML platform teams, Product engineering and Analytics to architect data fabrics, feature stores, and automated data contracts that accelerate GenAI development and democratize self-service analytics at scale. Your teams (managers and senior IC’s) will work across multiple business departments and be responsible for stewarding data from end-to-end. You will be partnering with Data Platform, Machine Learning, and Product engineering teams to create a bold vision and roadmap for how data powers products, analytics, ML and AI across DoorDash.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, backend systems, business intelligence, or related data functions.
- 6+ years of hands-on management experience, with a proven track record of building and growing large teams and managing through senior leaders and managers.
- Exceptional communication and leadership skills, with a proven ability to operate in a fast moving environment.
- Hands-on approach to closing gaps in data foundations and technical execution, reinforcing development standards and best practices that guarantee high quality, trustworthy data.
- Strong understanding of data related security and governance/controls.
- Prior experience with Data Warehouse or Data Lake solutions similar to Snowflake/Redshift, Cloud environments similar to AWS/GCP, Big Data solutions similar to Hadoop/Spark, Realtime Streaming solutions similar to Kafka/Flink.
- Knowledge of advanced visualization tools such as Tableau, Superset and Looker.
- Experience with AI-native data infrastructure, such as Feature Stores, Vector DBs, or LLM-integrated data pipelines.
- Proven track record of managing data platforms at scale, utilizing strategies like automated testing, CI/CD for data, and self-service dashboards to support high-growth teams.
- Strong understanding of Data Contract frameworks and strategies for managing heterogeneous data at scale.
Responsibilities
- Work with tech leaders to design/build right architectural patterns, frameworks and data governance practices to set strategic direction for data engineering at Doordash.
- Work with upstream data producers, product managers, business stakeholders and lead vertical data engineering teams to collect right data and build foundational data models/solutions.
- Define the vision for AI-powered and self-serve analytics experiences that accelerate decision-making at scale across the organization.
- Own Data quality and reliability outcomes for data pipelines and data products.
- Partner with platform engineering to build tooling that enables engineers and analysts to move faster— through automated observability, self-service access, and Data-as-a-Product principles.
- Lead annual and quarterly planning cycles to set long-term vision and near-term execution goals for your organization.
- Hire top talent to grow and nurture vertically aligned data engineering teams.
- Implement Data Contracts to enforce schema stability and quality automation, ensuring high-trust data for upstream AI/ML models.
- Accelerate GenAI and Agentic workflows by ensuring data accessibility, lineage, and contextual metadata availability.
- Partner with legal, privacy, and security teams to ensure data governance, compliance, and access controls meet organizational and regulatory requirements.
Benefits
- 401(k) plan with employer matching
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave
- wellness benefits
- commuter benefits match
- paid time off
- paid sick leave
- medical, dental, and vision benefits
- 11 paid holidays
- disability and basic life insurance
- family-forming assistance
- mental health program
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
