Description
We’re looking for a Principal Researcher to be a strategic research leader for EMEA, shaping what DoorDash builds next. You’ll combine deep expertise in qualitative and quantitative methods to find the unmet needs, behavioral shifts, and market openings that point to new products and new growth.
You’ll work as a peer to senior product, design, engineering, data science, and business leaders, and your work will directly inform roadmaps, investment decisions, and company-level strategy.
Responsibilities
- Shape Product Strategy: Translate deep understanding of Consumers, Merchants, and Couriers into a clear point of view on where DoorDash should play and win.
- Detect New Opportunities: Proactively identify emerging needs, behavior changes, and white space that point to new products, new verticals, and new growth levers.
- Lead Mixed-Methods Research: Design and run rigorous research end to end, choosing the right method for the question.
- Partner with Data Science and Experimentation: Work closely with data science and analytics to connect qualitative insight to A/B test design, metrics, and product outcomes.
- Apply AI to the Research Craft: Use AI tools and LLMs in your daily workflow for synthesis, analysis, survey and discussion guide design, and scaling qualitative depth.
- Influence and Communicate: Tell compelling, decision-ready stories that move partners from insight to action.
- Lead Through Others: Serve as a thought partner and mentor to researchers across levels, review and elevate research quality.
- Operate Across Brands and Regions: Bring a global lens to your work, partnering across brands, markets, and cultures.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in user, market, or product research at a technology company (or equivalent depth), with a track record of leading ambiguous, high-visibility work at staff level or above.
- Demonstrated impact on product strategy: examples where your research changed a roadmap, unlocked a new product or line of business, or redirected significant investment.
- Proven ability to detect and shape new product or growth opportunities, from early signal through validated concept.
- Expert command of both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, ethnography, and usability testing as well as survey design, statistical analysis, and experimentation.
- Hands-on experience using AI and LLMs in research (for example, synthesis, analysis, prototyping, or scaling qualitative work), with sound instincts about where they help and where they mislead.