Designer, Search

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About the role

#Team Nextdoor 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 . Meet Your Future Neighbors 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. The Impact You'll Make • 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 What You’ll Bring To The Team • 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

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