Senior Staff Software Engineer - Monetization

#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 Nextdoor generates revenue through advertising products that connect businesses with local customers, as well as subscription offerings such as Opportunity Alerts. Monetization Engineering builds the platforms and experiences that power, scale, and grow these revenue streams. We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer, reporting to the Head of Engineering, Monetization, to shape technical strategy and build scalable, reliable systems across Nextdoor’s native advertising platform and subscription products. This hands-on technical leader will partner with Product, Machine Learning, Data Science, and Engineering to align senior stakeholders and deliver complex initiatives with measurable business impact. 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 • Define the technical strategy and architecture for Nextdoor’s monetization platform, leading complex initiatives from concept through measurable outcomes • Build scalable, reliable, secure, and privacy-preserving systems that support advertising and SMB subscription products • Partner with Product, ML, Data Science, and Engineering to shape roadmaps, navigate tradeoffs, and deliver value for neighbors and businesses • Raise engineering standards and address systemic gaps in quality, reliability, observability, release safety, and developer productivity • Remain hands-on across architecture, critical implementation, design reviews, debugging, launches, and production operations • Participate in in-person Nextdoor events such as trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and team building exercises • Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to Nextdoor’s company culture What You’ll Bring To The Team • Exceptional system design skills and a proven record of building scalable, reliable, high-performance distributed systems • Deep experience building advertising platforms, including a strong understanding of large-scale native ad-serving systems • Expert-level proficiency in at least one of the languages: Java, Kotlin, or Python • Extensive experience building large-scale, real-time data pipelines using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Kafka Streams • A strong record of mentoring senior engineers, developing technical leaders, and raising the engineering bar across teams • Experience using AI-powered development workflows to improve engineering productivity, quality, and delivery speed Preferred skills • Experience developing or productionizing machine-learning models in partnership with ML engineers and data scientists • Strong understanding of advertising optimization engines, including pacing, bidding, ranking, and budget allocation Rewards