Designer, Search

Nextdoor is the essential neighborhood network. Neighbors, public agencies, and businesses use Nextdoor to connect around local information that matters in more than 350,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries. Nextdoor builds innovative technology to foster local community, share important news, and create neighborhood connections at scale. Download the app and join the neighborhood at nextdoor.com.

Search is where a neighbor tells us exactly what they need, and right now we aren't listening well enough. Someone types in a lost dog, a neighbor's name, last week's school thread, or occasionally a plumber, and too often the experience leaves them guessing. After years of under-investment, we're rebuilding Search from the ground up with executive backing and real resources, and you'll be the designer who shapes how it looks, feels, and behaves.

You've designed search or discovery before and can show the results. You think of search as a conversation rather than a list of links: what happens as someone starts typing, how very different kinds of results (posts, people, places, businesses) sit side by side, how a neighbor narrows things down, and what we say when we come up empty. You're also comfortable around revenue. You've worked beside ads and monetization teams and can design paid placements that feel like help instead of interruption. This is a long-haul effort, and you'll have a PM, data scientists, ML engineers, and researchers working alongside you.

At Nextdoor, we operate in an AI-first environment and expect every team member to actively use AI tools as part of their workflow. We aren't looking for prompt engineers; we’re looking for people who use tools like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Glean to challenge their own thinking and take full ownership of AI-assisted outputs.

We also offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment model, blending an in office presence and work from home experience for our valued employees. The hiring team will go over these expectations with you if you are being considered for a role near one of our offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and London. 

• Establish the design foundation for Search: the principles, patterns, and components that let a neighbor tell at a glance whether they found what they wanted, and that give the team a common yardstick for every experiment. This is your headline deliverable for the first six months
• Design across the full Search journey, organic and sponsored together, from the entry point and typeahead through results, filters, and overall page layout
• Serve the everyday searcher first: most people are hunting for a post, a neighbor, a place, or an answer, and each of those should feel purpose-built rather than squeezed into one generic list
• Work hand in hand with data science, ML engineering, and research so that smarter ranking and query understanding show up in the interface in ways neighbors can follow, including ambiguous queries, empty results, and low-confidence matches
• Define how sponsored and organic results coexist: where ads appear, how they're labeled, how many show up, and when a business has earned its spot
• Help the commercial side grow on local-business queries through experiences neighbors trust, treating relevance as a line revenue never crosses
• Prototype early and often, co-write test hypotheses with your PM and data partners, and let what the experiments show guide what you build next

• 5+ years of product design experience, with substantial time on search, discovery, or other dense, content-heavy surfaces used by large audiences
• A portfolio that shows full-range craft: framing the problem, interaction and visual design, prototyping, and real care for the unglamorous states like loading, empty, and error
• Enough fluency in how search works (query understanding, retrieval, ranking) to design alongside ML and LLM features, including the moments when they get things wrong
• Experience partnering with ads or monetization teams, and a point of view on when paid content helps people and when it gets in their way
• A record of lifting engagement and revenue through design, with sound judgment about the trade-offs between them
• Sharp consumer instincts and real curiosity about how neighbors look for local information
• Comfort designing for experimentation: framing hypotheses with PM and data science, interpreting mixed results, and recommending what ships
• Breadth across areas like growth, marketplaces, ads, or new-product work, and the adaptability to shift as priorities change
• Clear communication across disciplines, a bias for action, and the patience and drive for a long rebuild
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Java, or Xcode  

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create our total rewards package. Compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $175,000 - $190,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. The salary range will be determined by the candidate's geographic location.

We expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With quarterly vesting, your first vest date will take place within 3 months of your start date.

When it comes to benefits, we have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee only plan option, and we also provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we serve. We encourage everyone interested in our mission to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For information about our collection and use of applicants’ personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.