Associate Manager, DashMart - Network Strategy & Analytics

About the role

The New Verticals Logistics team’s goal is to drive efficiency while improving the quality and speed of New Vertical’s deliveries. Together, we're building the world's most reliable same-day logistics platform to fulfill our vision of empowering all local businesses. The projects we work on are diverse and have the potential to impact each side of our marketplace — from Dashers, to Consumers, to Merchants.

We are hiring a few Associate Managers that will focus on crafting and executing on how we win in some of our most strategic markets to how we strategize and plan to reach efficiency goals, all while ensuring sustainable yet strong growth for the business. You will report to a Senior Manager within our Central Strategy & Operations team. This is a non-technical role and sits under our Strategy & Operations job family, under the office of the COO. We operate in a hybrid model — you will spend some time in your home office, in person via offsites and testing products in the field — across DashMarts and third-party stores.

Responsibilities

• Operate: Understand the forecasting systems that power our business inside and out — serving as the DRI for forecast accuracy and continuously improving how we predict demand and labor needs.
• Experiment: Identify forecast variance drivers, develop hypotheses, and test model and product changes in partnership with Product, Engineering, and Data Science — including leveraging AI-enabled forecasting tools.
• Scale: Transform analytical insights into operational experiments that create measurable and scalable improvements in forecast precision.
• Build: Do whatever it takes to launch and maintain forecasting enhancements — from writing complex SQL queries to drafting product requirements and supporting GTM efforts.
• Analyze: Assess the operational and financial impacts of forecast improvements, model tradeoffs, and iterate based on data.
• Lead and collaborate: Influence a cross-functional team, including local operations, engineering, product, and data science, driving alignment on roadmap priorities.

Requirements

• You have 4-6+ years of professional experience. Ideally you have experience in product operations, financial services, logistics, consulting, engineering, launch operations, or business operations.
• You have a completed Bachelor’s Degree.

Skills

• You’re analytical: You have a strong analytical background, advanced SQL proficiency, and a deep understanding of AI tooling. You have past experience building models from scratch and use data to forecast outcomes.
• You solve problems from first principles: You’re excited to solve forecasting and operational problems in innovative ways, and you resist “this is how it’s always been done” thinking.
• You’re equally comfortable operating at 10,000 feet and 1 foot: You don’t hesitate to get in the weeds with SQL and data analysis, but you’re just as comfortable influencing roadmap discussions and strategic priorities.
• You have strong business acumen and understand how forecast decisions impact cost, service levels, and network performance.

About the team

Our New Verticals Strategy & Operations team is re-inventing the way consumers think about grocery, convenience, alcohol and retail delivery through both our first-party and third-party operations businesses. DashMarts are our first-party offering designed to provide on-demand deliveries by selling household essentials, groceries, brand-name favorites, local favorites and more. The end-to-end DashMart experience is powered through DoorDash. Third-party partnerships enable us to offer on-demand deliveries from both SMB and enterprise merchants across grocery, convenience, alcohol and retail storefronts. The merchants own the inventory, we fulfill and deliver them!

This team is the heartbeat of the New Verticals Strategy & Operations team that enables us to power a robust logistic platform through a high-quality, speedy and efficient network — for both DashMarts and third-party partners.

About the role

We’re hiring a Data Solutions Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database-agnostic abstractions. In this role, you will design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems, ensuring high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance. You’ll serve as a hands-on architect and technical partner to product engineering and infrastructure teams, helping translate complex business requirements into resilient and scalable data models. Your work will directly influence the evolution of Taulu, DoorDash’s unified storage abstraction layer, by shaping best practices and identifying platform gaps through real-world engagements. This is a high-impact, cross-functional role that combines deep technical expertise with a customer-centric approach. You’ll lead solutioning engagements from design through production, drive the adoption of Taulu modeling best practices, and ensure that our systems meet goals around reliability, cost efficiency, and velocity. You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed database solutions using Taulu, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and other paved-path storage solutions.
• Architect and optimize multi-region, globally distributed systems to meet our high standards for availability, latency, and throughput.
• Lead data modeling, performance tuning, and capacity planning for large-scale, mission-critical storage workloads.
• Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain-specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved-path storage solutions.
• Serve as the DRI for solutioning engagements, owning modeling in Taulu from experimentation through launch and scale.
• Shape the evolution of Taulu by identifying abstraction gaps and converting customer feedback into platform improvements.
• Apply workload-aware design patterns, including caching strategies, partitioning, and consistency tuning to improve performance and efficiency.
• Drive adoption of operational best practices across observability, schema design, capacity planning, and cost optimization across storage systems.
• Promote clarity and continuity by contributing to solutioning playbooks, decision logs, and architectural documentation.

Requirements

• You have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed data systems, with deep expertise in NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra, DynamoDB, or ScyllaDB.
• You have a strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery.
• You’ve led data modeling efforts for high-throughput, low-latency workloads and understand the real-world trade-offs involved in NoSQL schema design.
• You are experienced with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and know how to layer them effectively over storage systems to optimize for performance and cost.
• You have a customer-first mindset, and thrive when working closely with product and platform teams to translate complex requirements into clean, scalable data models.
• You are skilled at communicating complex architecture decisions and building alignment across infrastructure and product engineering organizations.
• You have a track record of mentoring engineers, influencing data architecture at scale, and fostering best practices in reliability, observability, and data access patterns.
• You document decisions, share learnings, and take pride in contributing to reusable playbooks and durable frameworks for others to build upon.

Skills

• Bonus: You’ve worked on or contributed to open-source distributed databases.

About the team

The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The teams are responsible for understanding Product Engineering’s evolving needs and developing platform and infrastructure capabilities to serve them. The team currently supports CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka and Redis as well as data abstraction services to reduce the complexity of interacting with storage systems for Product Engineers.

Pay

The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado, is $105,400—$155,000 USD. The successful candidate’s starting pay will fall within the pay range listed and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including 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 and a mental health program.

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).