Senior/Staff Deep Reinforcement Learning Engineer

DoorDash USA•San Francisco, CA

18h

About The Position

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.

Requirements

BS/MS/PhD in CS, EE, Robotics, or a related field, with a strong foundation in reinforcement learning and deep learning.
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 Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.

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