Lead, Design

Nextdoor•San Francisco, CA

2d•$240,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Lead Designer on Nextdoor's Consumer Product team, you'll help shape the future of how neighbors connect with one another, their neighborhoods, and local businesses and events. You'll join a collaborative team of designers, product managers, engineers, and researchers working to evolve and improve the experience across our platform. We're hiring a player-coach to lead craft for Consumer Design, someone who runs a rigorous crit, coaches designers toward their next level, and holds the line when speed and quality trade off, while still shipping hands-on work themselves. Deeply human-centered and mission-driven, you're excited to create digital experiences that strengthen real-world connections and empower neighbors to build stronger communities. 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.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in UX design, product design, or a related field, with a strong track record of designing and shipping user-centered products. Including experience directly managing designers through performance and promotion cycles
A track record as a player-coach, practicing designer and people manager at once, with the discipline to protect your own IC time
Calibrated craft judgment: you can run a crit, make a leveling call, and defend it in calibration
Proficiency in Figma and other design tools for creating wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs
Experience working with and contributing to design systems, ensuring consistency and scalability across surfaces
Strong understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods, with the ability to synthesize insights into actionable design decisions
Comfort holding a design position in rooms with executives, backed by evidence rather than taste
Fluency with AI-assisted design tooling and a clear sense of where it helps and where it can't substitute for human judgment

Responsibilities

Running weekly design critiques and rebuilding a healthy manager-level review process so projects of every size get rigorous feedback at the right altitude
Establishing regular 1:1s and growth plans for a team of consumer designers, and advocating for their growth and promotion during performance review cycles
Owning the design capacity model across seven product areas, managing a team of 5 to 6 consumer designers. Owning the capacity model and the recommendation on where design headcount goes
Representing design's point of view in product discussions where speed and craft are in tension, starting with a key decision about how neighbors filter and navigate content in the app
Arbitrating design-system exceptions, deciding when to say no to a one-off component that doesn't belong in our shared design system
Shipping hands-on design work yourself on at least one high-impact area of the consumer product
Participating in in-person Nextdoor events such as trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and team building exercises
Building in-person relationships with team members and contributing to Nextdoor's company culture