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. DoorDash Drive 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: A reputation management platform. Think of it as a merchant's central command center for understanding and acting on what their customers are saying and then helping them do something about it.

Our products sit within the DoorDash Commerce Platform that serves enterprise restaurant brands, regional chains, and independent operators. You'll be working across multiple products at varying stages of maturity.

You’re excited about this opportunity because...

This is as much a strategy role as it is an operations role. Below are examples of the types of problems you'll be tasked with owning or supporting upon joining the team:

• 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. When operators tell you something, you'll ask 20 more questions to more deeply understand where they're coming from — and whether the product, the pitch, or both need to change.
• 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. If you've ever thought - "I wish a job existed where I could build new products alongside Product/Eng, and engage directly with end customers" then you're in luck.

We're excited about you because...

• You've brought a product to market before — or been close enough to the process that you know what it actually takes (not just the framework, the work)
• You're genuinely curious about the product. You'd ask for a demo before you started strategizing about go-to-market. You'd want to understand the problems a merchant is trying to solve before building a pitch deck.
• You can sell. Not "support the sales team" sell — actually get on a call with decision makers, understand their problems and objections and influence them.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. These products are at different stages. Priorities shift. You'll need to manage context-switch between building a prototype, standing up a new merchant facing process and troubleshooting a merchant issue in the same afternoon.
• You use AI tools to give yourself leverage. You build workflows in Claude Code, automate analysis, and use AI to move faster than someone without those tools. This is how you operate day-to-day, not something you're "interested in exploring."
• You have a strong personality and build rapport easily. You can work with opinionated, direct stakeholders and hold your own without being combative.
• You'd rather go talk to an end customer than sit in a room theorizing about what they want.

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 If...

• You need structure handed to you. There's no established playbook, no onboarding curriculum for the products, no "here's how we've always done it."
• You're more comfortable analyzing than doing. This role requires you to build things, sell things, and make decisions with incomplete information — not write recommendation decks.
• 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. If that distinction doesn't resonate, this isn't the right fit.
• 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. This is a Swiss-army-knife role across multiple products at different stages. If you want to go deep on one thing, this will frustrate you.

We expect this position to be filled by 4/26/2026.

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