DoorDash Engineering Blog

Learn about high impact projects that power our velocity, reliability, and innovation.

Featured Article

Backend General Gradual Code Releases Using an In-House Kubernetes Canary Controller

New service releases deployed into DoorDash’s microservice architecture immediately begin processing and serving their entire volume of production traffic. If one of those services is buggy, however, customers may have a degraded experience or the site may go down completely. Although we currently have a traffic management solution under development for gradual service rollouts as ...

MarcoChirico

15 Minute Read

Culture General

What to Expect from DoorDash’s Technical Interview

Follow these helpful tips when preparing for DoorDash's technical interview.

Kirtan Patel 15 Minute Read

Backend General

Optimizing OpenTelemetry’s Span Processor for High Throughput and Low CPU Costs

When companies move to microservices, they need to address a new challenge of setting up distributed tracing to identify availability or performance issues throughout the platform. While various tools offered on the market or through open-source perform this task, there is often a lack of standardization, making leveraging these tools costly or complicated. As DoorDash ...

Santosh Banda 24 Minute Read

Backend General

Examining Problematic Memory in C/C++ Applications with BPF, perf, and Memcheck

As applications grow in complexity, memory stability is often neglected, causing problems to appear over time. When applications experience consequences of problematic memory implementations, developers may find it difficult to pinpoint the root cause. While there are tools available that automate detecting memory issues, those tools often require re-running the application in special environments, resulting ...

Filip Busic 47 Minute Read

General Machine Learning

Best Practices for Regression-free Machine Learning Model Migrations

Migrating functionalities from a legacy system to a new service is a fairly common endeavor, but moving machine learning (ML) models is much more challenging. Successful migrations ensure that the new service works as well or better than its legacy version. But the complexity of ML models makes regressions more likely to happen and harder ...

Ying Chi 14 Minute Read

General

Rebuilding our Pricing Framework for Better Auditability, Observability, and Price Integrity

Learn how we migrated our pricing logic to microservices

Zhengli Sun 9 Minute Read

Mobile

Launching Dark Mode While Building a Scalable Design System

A large number of our DoorDash deliveries happen during the evening and in late night hours. Dashers, our delivery partners, were finding it really hard to use the Dasher app because the app’s bright screens did not adapt to the lower lighting conditions. The abundance of white in the design meant that critical information, such ...

Pradeep Devarabetta Mallikarjun

Laura Rodriguez

Gerardo Diaz 32 Minute Read

General

Using java.time to Increase Code Readability and Reduce Errors

Given the importance of time in our services and the need to scale, java.time works much better than primitives.

Kevin Huang 6 Minute Read

Data Machine Learning

Building Riviera: A Declarative Real-Time Feature Engineering Framework

In a business with fluid dynamics between customers, drivers, and merchants, real-time data helps make crucial decisions which grow our business and delights our customers. Machine learning (ML) models play a big role in improving the experience on our platform, but models can only be as powerful as their underlying features. As a result, building ...

Allen Wang

Kunal Shah 17 Minute Read

Mobile

Building Multiple Distinctly Branded iOS Apps from a Single Codebase

A scalable solution for supporting multiple iOS apps means leveraging a common app library and design language system.

David Phan 15 Minute Read

General

Using a Decision Engine to Power a First Class Customer Experience

DoorDash's decision engine empowers customer service agents to deliver consistent, effective solutions for customer issues.

Preetha Vijaya Saraswathi

Derrick Hu

Kevin Nguyen

Alex Liu 8 Minute Read

Machine Learning

Why Good Forecasts Treat Human Input as Part of the Model

At DoorDash, getting forecasting right is critical to the success of our logistics-driven business, but historical data alone isn’t enough to predict future demand. We need to ensure there are enough Dashers, our name for delivery drivers, in each market for timely order delivery. And even though it seems like people’s demand for food delivery ...

Brian Seo 10 Minute Read

Culture

How I Found Career Growth and a Work-Life Blend as a Mother in Tech

In September of 2019 I had one child and another on the way. At the same time, I was working as a software engineer, a career often notable for late nights and weekend work. In addition, my focus in supporting infrastructure usually requires a rotating on-call, where I might need to troubleshoot an outage outside ...

Manushree Ankapura 14 Minute Read