Can you share your journey to DoorDash and your role so far?
I'm currently a Software Engineer on the Storefront Engineering team and I've been at DoorDash about four and a half years. I've been in the Merchant organization the whole time, but I've worked on different teams within the organization. I started off on the Merchant Selection team, where I led the engineering effort to launch the self-serve merchant onboarding application, which allows merchants to onboard to our marketplace platform on their own. Then I worked on the Merchant Experience team on the merchant portal product, which is a website where merchants can view sales order history and sign up for different DoorDash offerings. Last year, I transitioned to the Loyalty team where I helped build out the web flow to allow merchants to create loyalty programs. And earlier this month, I moved to the Storefront Engineering team, where I'm working on the login with DoorDash feature.
What career mobility and/or growth opportunities have you experienced at DoorDash?
I feel like growth is built in at DoorDash because you get so much responsibility and trust from the start. In my first project here, I built a new app from the ground up, which was something completely new to me. I felt very supported through this new experience, since I was given the resources that I needed in terms of getting a great mentor and more engineers to help me with the project once we realized that the scope was larger than expected. Working on projects like this really challenged me and took me out of my comfort zone, which has helped me grow and build my confidence.
Changing teams is another growth opportunity I've experienced at DoorDash. It's something that's allowed me to learn about different problems within the company, as well as work on different technologies, since different teams at DoorDash sometimes use different tech stacks. I think most engineers would agree that continuing to learn about new problems and tech is not only exciting, but also necessary to grow your career. Changing teams has helped me grow my network within the company, since I've gotten to work with many different people. It's also allowed me to learn about different processes on different teams and bring what I like from one team to others.
How does DoorDash celebrate diverse ideas and people?
We do this internally and externally. Internally, there's lots of programs and initiatives to support diverse ideas and people. I participated in the Women's Leadership Forum, which was a program to support community and development of women leaders in technical roles within the company. That program helped me build my network of technical women at the company and also identify the strategic skills that I need to advance my career.
Externally, there's a ton of social impact initiatives. One of my favorites is Kitchen Without Borders, which was launched a couple of years ago. That's a program that supports immigrant and refugee owned businesses by providing resources like marketing support, advising, and loan matching for those immigrant refugee owned businesses. There's a lot of initiatives like that that DoorDash has supported and continues to support.
What are ways in which you've experienced this culture of inclusivity and belonging?
For me, it's really through the camaraderie I have felt working with my team and with other teams across DoorDash. I've been really lucky to work with tight-knit teams that work well together. We genuinely have fun shipping products, being in the code, and at the same time fixing bugs to get features out.
There's also a really big culture within DoorDash and DoorDash engineering in terms of being open to new ideas. For example, when I was working on supporting DoorDash's launch in Japan in 2021, I saw that other developers and I were creating the same kind of code over and over in different codebases. I proposed that we create one library for it so that we wouldn't have to duplicate code and it would increase our velocity as well. That idea ended up being accepted and made into a library by one of the teams that we were working with. Now it's being used across a lot of different DoorDash web apps.
What do you love most about working at DoorDash?
It's the people. I've met great mentors, I've had great working relationships with my colleagues, and I made a lot of good friends here as well. Working with people that are kind and that I admire and respect, and work well with is a really big part of my daily happiness and something that I really appreciate about working here. A close second is the impact that you can have, as well as the growth opportunities.
