How DoorDash Launches a New Country in One Week

DoorDash rebuilt its Dasher onboarding system using a three-layer modular architecture: a thin orchestrator for routing, composable workflow definitions per market, and self-contained step modules behind standardized interfaces. This replaced a legacy system of hard-coded country-specific if/else branches and fragmented state across multiple database tables. The new design uses a single JSON status map for all onboarding state, enabling atomic per-step updates and simple progress reconstruction. The result: Puerto Rico launched in one week, Canada in two weeks, Australia in under a month, and New Zealand with almost no new code. The post covers the architectural layers, the status map design, the parallel migration strategy, and honest tradeoffs including coordination overhead and the limits of module reuse across fundamentally different regulatory regimes.