Distill the LLM, Don't Serve It: Search & Personalization at DoorDash — Raghav Saboo, DoorDash

Raghav Saboo, Staff ML Engineer at DoorDash, argues that semantic understanding, not engagement, is the real bottleneck in marketplace discovery. He walks through four LLM-driven primitives (graded relevance supervision, semantic IDs, multi-timescale consumer memory, and steerable personalized collections) and explains the core pattern of reasoning offline with LLMs and distilling that into fast serving models.