Senior Product Manager, Search

Nextdoor

1d•$170,000 - $230,000

About The Position

As a Product Manager on the Search team, you'll take on one of the most consequential rebuilds at Nextdoor. Search is the most explicit statement of intent a neighbor makes on the platform, and most searches aren't commercial at all: a lost-pet post, a neighbor's name, a school thread from last week, and sometimes a plumber. Search has been under-resourced for years and it shows. That changes now, with executive sponsorship, dedicated investment, and a blank sheet. You'll own the rebuild end to end, organic and monetized search together, from the quality of every result to how sponsored content earns its place on the page. We're looking for a search expert who has done this before: someone who has owned consumer search, made it measurably better for users, and defined the relevance and quality metrics to prove it. You'll need real commercial literacy too. You've worked shoulder to shoulder with the ads and monetization side, built genuine empathy for why the business needs to extract value from search, and you know firsthand how sponsored content, ad load, and paid-organic blending actually behave. You know that great search monetization makes results better, not worse, and you've seen engagement and revenue grow together when both sides pull in the same direction. This is a multi-year rebuild rather than a tuning exercise, and you won't do it alone: dedicated data science partners, ML engineers with search backgrounds, and design coverage are committed to the team. Ideally, you've also built beyond search and bring the range of a generalist athlete who can flex across consumer, marketplace, and business-facing problems. You'll partner closely with engineering, data science, research, design, and PMM to turn that thinking into shipped experiments with real, measurable 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.

Requirements

7+ years of product management experience, including deep ownership of consumer search at scale and clear wins in making it better for users
Working knowledge of information retrieval fundamentals, including query understanding, retrieval, and ranking, plus experience defining search relevance and quality metrics from scratch and shipping ML- or LLM-powered search features
Experience working directly with the monetization side of search, whether you owned it or partnered closely with ads and revenue teams, and genuine empathy for how the business extracts value from search
A track record of growing engagement and revenue together, with the judgment to know when monetization improves the user experience and when it degrades it
Strong consumer product instincts built from shipping experiences used at scale, and genuine curiosity about how neighbors search for and find local information
A strong track record designing and analyzing A/B tests, including balancing revenue metrics against engagement guardrails, and translating ambiguous or conflicting signals into a clear ship decision
Range beyond search: you've shipped in adjacent areas like growth, marketplace, ads, or 0-to-1 products, and you flex quickly as the team's needs evolve
Excellent cross-functional communication skills, a bias toward action, and the appetite for a multi-year rebuild rather than a quick optimization win

Responsibilities

Build the missing foundation first: define the metric that tells us whether a neighbor found what they came for, and make it the measure every experiment and ship call answers to. It does not exist today, and it's the most important thing you'll deliver in your first six months
Own the Search rebuild end to end, organic and monetized together, from query understanding and retrieval to ranking, result quality, and how the page comes together
Make the majority of searches work: most queries are a neighbor looking for a post, a person, a place, or an answer, with no commercial intent, and today we fail them too often
Partner with dedicated data science and ML engineering on query understanding, retrieval, and ranking, going deep on the mechanics when the details matter
Design how organic and sponsored content blend on the page, including placement, ad load, relevance thresholds, and monetization-eligibility routing, so paid results appear only where a business is the genuine answer
Grow revenue on the minority of queries with commercial intent, connecting neighbors to local businesses through organic and sponsored placements, with relevance as the guardrail revenue never overrides