I came across the DoorDash engineering blog while I was preparing for foodpanda Japan (I had always wanted to work for a food delivery service !) interview this coming week. It’s impressive to see how much effort your engineering team poured to keep your engineering blog updated. It shows me how much you are willing to share your learning process (although ultimately this is going to connect to marketing purposes) with the world. Just as simple as that, I clicked on your career page and found out that you are hiring in Tokyo! It seems like you are going to have a new engineering team in Tokyo soon.
For the technical side, I will just let you judge it from my resume. But on the other side, I think I am good at making connections whether to the engineering team or to the non-engineer team. I am the go-to person to talk to for teams and I enjoyed it! Not only for work but teammates come to me for personal stuff too. I speak Japanese (lived here for 10 years!) and English (it’s a bit rusty though) and most importantly because I love to interact with different kinds of people so having me on your founding team isn’t that bad, right?
On the product side, I am really curious why DoorDash came into a super-saturated market after other food delivery services and here are a few things I can tell you as a food delivery heavy user. From the perspective of pricing, UberEats try to solve this by introducing subscription plans (paying a fixed amount of money and getting free delivery) while Chompy (local service) provides free delivery at certain times (the tradeoff is the food might not be fresh because they are delivered in bulk). Still, prices don’t necessarily get cheaper with the subscription plan and free delivery is often out of service due to popular demand. However, from my experience, Chompy cares more about customers. No food damage happened and they are often more friendly. But still, Chompy has fewer options than Uber Eats. So there is no clear winner, at least for now. Basically, as a user, I want cheap and delicious food. That’s all. In Japan’s current market there is no winner yet, so let’s be the one that makes users (at least users like me) happy!