DoorDash has hired ex Twitter and Groupon execs to spearhead big expansion plans

This month, food delivery service DoorDash added former Twitter VP of engineering, Jeremy Rishel, and former VP of product at Groupon, Rajat Shroff, to its team.
Rishel and Shroff will be joining the company in its efforts to expand into more cities and deliver products other than food.

Food delivery service DoorDash has added two new execs to its senior management team: Twitter's former VP of engineering, Jeremy Rishel, and Rajat Shroff who previously worked as VP of product at Groupon. Both Rishel and Shroff will help DoorDash fine tune its delivery time predictions and build the company's ever-growing stable of restaurants and food brands.

Rishel will oversee DoorDash's engineering department, reporting to CEO Tony Xu. Having joined Twitter in 2013 through the acquisition of Bluefin Labs, Rishel most recently focused on video engineering efforts and machine learning. Machine learning is particularly important to DoorDash, as it competes in a tough market against other startups like Postmates and giants such as Amazon and Uber.

DoorDash currently delivers tens of millions of orders per day, creating a trove of data that Rishel intends to tap into in order to hone DoorDash's travel and meal prep time predictions. Rishel plans on mining the company's vast datasets that detail different geographies, restaurants, order patterns, and product experiences in attempt to further customize each user experience.

Rishel, who plans to double the size of DoorDash's engineering team. says he sees similarities between the Twitter and DoorDash: "Both companies have to work across a very broad set of technologies at very large scale," said Rishel. "For DoorDash, the challenge is at an earlier stage."

Shroff, too, has big plans for DoorDash's future. He'll oversee the four-year-old company's product, design and growth teams, and will also report to CEO Xu.

At the top of his priority list is helping DoorDash expand into more cities — DoorDash is currently in the US and Canada, and under Shroff the goal is to continue to expand domestically and internationally. He'll also figure out how to utilize more types of delivery vehicles and to support new use-cases for delivery beyond food.