Machine Learning

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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

Data Machine Learning

How to Drive Effective Data Science Communication with Cross-Functional Teams

Analytics teams focused on detecting meaningful business insights may overlook the need to effectively communicate those insights to their cross-functional partners who can use those recommendations to improve the business. Part of the DoorDash Analytics team’s success comes from its ability to communicate actionable insights to key stakeholders, not just identify and measure them. Many ...

Running Experiments with Google Adwords for Campaign Optimization

Running experiments on marketing channels involves many challenges, yet at DoorDash, we found a number of ways to optimize our marketing with rigorous testing on our digital ad platforms. While data scientists frequently run experiments, such as A/B tests, on new features, the methodology and results may not seem so clear when applied to digital ...

Building Flexible Ensemble ML Models with a Computational Graph

DoorDash extended its machine learning platform to support ensemble models.

Wanted: Data Scientists with Technical Brilliance AND Business Sense

DoorDash seeks data scientists who prioritize the business impacts of their work.

2020 Hindsight: Building Reliability and Innovating at DoorDash

DoorDash recaps a number of its engineering highlights from 2020, including its microservices architecture, data platform, and new frontend development.

Things Not Strings: Understanding Search Intent with Better Recall

For every growing company using an out-of-the-box search solution there comes a point when the corpus and query volume get so big that developing a system to understand user search intent is needed to consistently show relevant results. We ran into a similar problem at DoorDash where, after we set up a basic “out-of-the-box” search ...

Iterating Real-time Assignment Algorithms Through Experimentation

DoorDash operates a large, active on-demand logistics system facilitating food deliveries in over 4,000 cities. When customers place an order through DoorDash, they can expect it to be delivered within an hour. Our platform determines the Dasher, our term for a delivery driver, most suited to the task and offers the assignment. Complex real-time logistic ...

Building a Gigascale ML Feature Store with Redis, Binary Serialization, String Hashing, and Compression

When a company with millions of consumers such as DoorDash builds machine learning (ML) models, the amount of feature data can grow to billions of records with millions actively retrieved during model inference under low latency constraints. These challenges warrant a deeper look into selection and design of a feature store — the system responsible ...