Designer, Search

Nextdoor

8d • $175,000 - $190,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Nextdoor is rebuilding Search from the ground up, and this designer will shape how the experience looks, feels, and behaves. The role focuses on helping neighbors find posts, people, places, businesses, and answers through an experience that treats search as a conversation rather than a generic list of links. The designer will establish Search’s design foundation during the first six months, creating principles, patterns, and components that help neighbors understand results and give the team a consistent basis for experimentation.

The designer will work across the full Search journey, from entry and typeahead through results, filters, and page layout, designing organic and sponsored content together. They will partner closely with product management, data science, machine learning engineering, and research to make ranking and query understanding legible in the interface, including for ambiguous queries, empty results, and low-confidence matches. They will also help grow local-business revenue through relevant, trustworthy sponsored experiences.

Nextdoor operates in an AI-first environment and expects team members to actively use AI tools in their workflow, take ownership of AI-assisted outputs, and use tools such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Glean to challenge their thinking. Nextdoor describes its work environment as hybrid, combining in-office and work-from-home work. Expectations for roles near offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and London will be discussed by the hiring team.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of product design experience, including substantial experience with search, discovery, or other dense, content-heavy surfaces used by large audiences.
• A portfolio demonstrating problem framing, interaction and visual design, prototyping, and attention to loading, empty, and error states.
• Fluency in search concepts such as query understanding, retrieval, and ranking sufficient to design alongside ML and LLM features, including when they produce incorrect results.
• Experience partnering with advertising or monetization teams and a point of view on when paid content helps users or gets in their way.
• A record of increasing engagement and revenue through design, with sound judgment about trade-offs between them.
• Strong consumer instincts and curiosity about how neighbors search for local information.
• Comfort designing for experimentation, including framing hypotheses with product management and data science, interpreting mixed results, and recommending what to ship.
• Clear communication across disciplines, bias for action, and patience and drive for a long-term rebuild.
• Active use of AI tools as part of the workflow, with ownership of AI-assisted outputs.

Nice To Haves

• Breadth across areas such as growth, marketplaces, ads, or new-product work.
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Java, or Xcode.

Responsibilities

• Establish Search design principles, patterns, and components, with this design foundation as the primary deliverable for the first six months.
• Design the full Search journey, including entry points, typeahead, results, filters, and overall page layout, for both organic and sponsored content.
• Design purpose-built experiences for people searching for posts, neighbors, places, businesses, and answers.
• Partner with data science, ML engineering, and research to make ranking and query understanding clear in the interface, including ambiguous queries, empty results, and low-confidence matches.
• Define how sponsored and organic results coexist, including ad placement, labeling, quantity, and when a business merits inclusion.
• Help grow the commercial business through trusted experiences for local-business queries, maintaining relevance as a boundary for revenue efforts.
• Prototype frequently, develop test hypotheses with product and data partners, and use experiment results to guide subsequent design.
• Actively use AI tools in the workflow and take ownership of AI-assisted outputs.

Benefits

• Variety of health plans, including an employee-only option that is 100% covered.
• OneMedical membership for concierge care.
• Meaningful equity grant with quarterly vesting; the first vest date is within three months of the start date.
• Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs as part of the total rewards package.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed