Principal Researcher

Our Global Structure Deliveroo is now part of DoorDash, bringing together teams with even greater reach, scale, and ambition. Depending on your role, you may collaborate with teammates, systems, and leaders across DoorDash and Wolt. Together, we’re unlocking new possibilities as one global team. About the Team DoorDash’s mission is to grow and empower local economies. By building intelligent, last-mile delivery technology for local cities, DoorDash connects people with the local businesses they care about — helping grow businesses and the communities that support those businesses. At DoorDash, there are three audiences that are at the core of every decision we make - our Consumers, Merchants, and Couriers. The Research team has a direct link to uncover the unmet needs and pain points of each of these audiences. We bring their voices into the business in order to help set the strategic vision for all of DoorDash’s current and future products. About the Role 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. This role is built for a seasoned researcher who is equally comfortable in a living room interview, a survey dataset, and a leadership review, and who uses AI as a daily tool to move faster and see further, without giving up the judgment that makes research trustworthy. You’ll also raise the bar for the wider research practice by mentoring researchers, sharing methods, and helping the team define what great looks like in an AI-enabled era. What You’ll Be Doing Shape Product Strategy: Translate deep understanding of Consumers, Merchants, and Couriers into a clear point of view on where DoorDash should play and win. You’ll frame the highest-stakes questions, bring evidence to roadmap and investment debates, and influence decisions at the director and executive level. Detect New Opportunities: Proactively identify emerging needs, behavior changes, and white space that point to new products, new verticals, and new growth levers. You’ll size and validate opportunities with a mix of foundational discovery, market and competitive context, and behavioral data, and turn them into concepts teams can act on. Lead Mixed-Methods Research: Design and run rigorous research end to end, choosing the right method for the question: ethnography, in-depth interviews, diary studies, and usability testing alongside surveys, conjoint and MaxDiff, segmentation, experiment design, and behavioral and log analysis. You’ll triangulate across sources so the “what,” the “how much,” and the “why” tell one coherent story. 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, and to explain the “why” behind results. You’ll help teams learn from what worked, what didn’t, and what to test next. 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, and design human-in-the-loop checks that catch confident but wrong outputs. You’ll help the team identify where AI accelerates research and where it should not be trusted, and contribute to shared prompts, workflows, and standards. You’ll also study how people experience AI-powered features across DoorDash’s products. Influence and Communicate: Tell compelling, decision-ready stories that move partners from insight to action. You’ll adapt depth and format to the moment, from a fast directional read that unblocks a team this week to a foundational body of work that anchors a multi-year strategy, and you’ll follow through to see that findings change what gets built. Lead Through Others: Serve as a thought partner and mentor to researchers across levels, review and elevate research quality, and help partners run good research on their own where that makes sense. You’ll help set the team’s research agenda, methods, and standards, and contribute to hiring and growing the team. Operate Across Brands and Regions: Bring a global lens to your work, partnering across brands, markets, and cultures and adapting approaches to local context so that insights scale beyond a single market. What We’re Looking For • 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. Working knowledge of SQL, R, or Python for pulling and analyzing your own data is a plus • 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. Experience researching AI-powered products is a plus • Experience in consumer, two-sided or multi-sided marketplace, logistics, commerce, or local services contexts is a plus • Exceptional storytelling and executive presence, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders without authority and build trust across product, design, engineering, data science, a