Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning – DoorDash Labs
About The Position
DoorDash Labs, established in 2018, serves as the innovation hub for DoorDash, focusing on developing automation and robotics solutions to enhance last-mile logistics. The team's mission is to create technologies that support and augment human networks, aiming to improve efficiency for Dashers, merchants, and consumers alike. We’re ruthlessly focused on business impact. We are a highly senior and nimble team composed of a core group of veterans from a variety of different robotics industries. We are seeking a seasoned Senior Planner Engineer with a proven track record of shipping production-level autonomy systems. The engineers will design, implement, and deploy behavior and motion planning algorithms that enable safe, reliable, and fully autonomous delivery. The ideal candidate has lived through the full development lifecycle of an autonomous product and intimately understands the practical challenges and trade-offs required to build planning systems that are not just novel, but robust, reliable, and performant. You will be a key technical voice, expected to solve our most critical challenges by drawing upon your extensive prior experience in the field.
Requirements
- You have a BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- You have strong C++ software engineering experience building robust, production-quality systems.
- You have experience developing or deploying motion planning, robotics, or real-time decision-making systems.
- You are comfortable working with data-driven evaluation, simulation, and performance metrics to guide engineering decisions.
Responsibilities
- Design and ship real-time behavior and motion planning features for complex urban/suburb driving scenarios.
- Lead root-cause analysis and systematically eliminate planner-related disengagements and long-tail failures.
- Build scalable evaluation, simulation, and validation frameworks to ensure safe rollout to new geo-fenced regions.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with perception, prediction, controls, and platform teams to deliver end-to-end autonomy improvements.
- Contribute to architecture decisions that improve planner robustness, generalization, and computational efficiency.
Benefits
- 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)
- medical, dental, and vision benefits
- 11 paid holidays
- disability and basic life insurance
- family-forming assistance
- a mental health program
- flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
