Distill the LLM， Don't Serve It: Search & Personalization at DoorDash — Raghav Saboo， DoorDash
DoorDash staff ML engineer Raghav Saboo argues that marketplace discovery is a semantic-understanding problem, then shows how DoorDash distills LLM reasoning offline into four shared primitives — graded supervision, semantic IDs, consumer memory, and steerable content generation — so traditional retrieval and ranking systems can serve them cheaply at billion-item scale.