Engineering after 6 months: still great overall, negative reviews are mostly false - Senior Software Engineer DoorDash Employee Review

4.0
Nov 15, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are some recent negative reviews here which I feel completely misrepresent the engineering org. Here's the truth: Is there tech debt? Yes, a medium amount. I've also been in this industry for 10 years and I've seen truly bad tech debt where you have giant codebases with absolutely 0 tests/monitoring. That is not the case here by any means. Do not pay attention to people saying our code is "terrible" -- every codebase has terrible modules, but overall it's nothing out of the ordinary. Truly smart people work in the engineering org. Everyone on my team is great - seriously not a single slacker or incompetent team member. Even outside of my team, I interviewed with the guy who built the first version of DynamoDB (he now works at DoorDash!). We're working on really interesting problems involving distributed systems, machine learning, NLP, etc. You will learn and grow as an engineer if you work here and put in the effort to get to know some of the team, period. Management is very respectful and has given me plenty of opportunities to work on high profile projects, grow as an engineer, etc. I don't know why people complain about a lack of mentorship; I suspect those people just want someone to hold their hand and don't understand how to put in the work themselves. If you're a self-starter, you'll have no problem here. I mean that, it really couldn't be easier to grow and move up the ranks: the first meeting I ever had with my manager involved them sitting down with me, going in depth regarding my career goals, explaining exactly how to "level up" and what is expected of each level, plus what I should work on personally to get to the goals I was interested in. I've never had a company be that upfront about my performance and really try to understand my career goals - and this happens on a regular basis. This is great.

Cons

Again, medium amount of tech debt. We're currently dedicating serious resources to fixing debt and improving system stability, so I'm happy with the way the management team is taking this, but we still have a ways to go here. I'm confident we'll fix the most glaring issues given a bit more time. CTO is pretty green all things considered. There's an active search for a VPE to fill in the gaps and the pipeline is full of candidates, so I suspect this will improve very soon. If you're not used to working at a startup, you will struggle here. Everyone is juggling multiple responsibilities and moving quickly; we have competition and we have to beat the competition to win the space. It's a good problem to have, but also leads to some stressful situations on occasion -- nothing out of the ordinary for a high growth company, but something to keep in mind.

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5.0
Jun 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- great healthcare - great recruiting leadership - great compensation

Cons

- limited promotion opportunities - layoffs due to struggling economy

3.0
Jun 9, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You make tips and get to shop at a lot of stores. More areas are open for delivery. You don't go far and have specific zones, like cities, you stay in usually. They give you a special tier of being a Dasher when you're doing the best deliveries, they're called tiers from silver to gold to platinum. Platinum gives you the dash now button allowing you to dash whenever.

Cons

Sometimes the delivery will get marked as if you didn't deliver the item and it gets put on you. There's sometimes drastic waits between orders. The restaurant may be closed or out of the thing the customer ordered. You can't decline order or else the acceptance rating goes down and you'll lose the certain requirements to be a higher tier driver.

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