Senior Associate, Innovation & New Bets - Strategy & Operations

About The Team

DoorDash Drive is our company’s hypergrowth fulfillment platform serving restaurants, grocers, and retailers across the United States and abroad. It allows restaurants, grocers, and retailers to enable ecommerce fulfillment for their first-party experiences.

About The Role

We're bringing SaaS products to market for our merchant partners targeted at 1/ helping them build deep, rich relationships with their customers and 2/ surfacing their brand in the way that lands with potential customers — and we need someone who can help us bring these to market in a way that resonates and drives adoption.

Example Problems

• Iterate the sales playbook and product positioning.
• Figure out what messaging lands with different merchant segments — enterprise chains, mid-market regionals, independents.
• Test it. Iterate. Scale it.
• Run competitive positioning. Map the landscape, build the case for why merchants should buy this over alternatives (or over doing nothing, which can sometimes be the more common competitor).
• Sell directly to merchants. This is a consultative sales motion. You'll be on calls with merchant decision-makers — marketers, operations leads, franchise business consultants — deeply understanding their workflows and goals to help them understand how these tools can solve their day-to-day problems and provide them with additional leverage.
• Onboard merchants. Design and run the onboarding experience. Figure out what drives high adoption and stickiness across different org structures.
• Shape the product. You're the closest person to the merchant. You'll feed quantitative data and qualitative feedback into the product roadmap.
• Work cross-functionally. Our closest team members are Product, Engineering, Analytics, and Sales — the right person for this role can get technical where needed (hello Claude Code!) and collaborate heavily with account owners to sell direct to Merchants.

Preferred Qualifications

• Restaurant or food tech operators who've been close to the merchant experience
• SaaS go-to-market roles, especially at early-stage or growth-stage companies
• Startup operators who've worn multiple hats and built processes from scratch
• Consultants — but the kind who built things, not just advised on them

Required Qualifications

• You've done some version of consultative selling — whether that was your title or not
• You have real product curiosity (you dig into how things work, not just how to position them)
• You can build and test a pricing or GTM hypothesis, not just present one
• You're fluent with AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, similar) as part of your daily workflow
• You can write clearly, present persuasively, and hold a room with senior stakeholders
• You're comfortable spanning enterprise and SMB segments — different merchants, different motivations, different sales motions

This Role Is NOT for You

• You need structure handed to you
• You're more comfortable analyzing than doing
• Your AI fluency means using ChatGPT to wordsmith emails and polish slide decks. We mean something different: using tools like Claude Code to build workflows, automate repetitive analysis, and give yourself operational leverage
• You operate better on an island
• The cross-functional partners here are smart and opinionated. You need to build trust and navigate these relationships both internally and externally
• You want a clearly scoped lane

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).

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, among others.

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.

Notice to Applicants for Jobs Located in NYC or Remote Jobs Associated With Office in NYC Only

We used Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provided Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023. We resumed using Covey Scout for Inbound again on June 29, 2024, and ceased using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 30, 2026. The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor. Results of the audit may be viewed here: https://getcovey.com/nyc-local-law-144.