Data Scientist - Search

Nextdoor (NYSE: NXDR) 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.

As Data Scientists at Nextdoor, you will have the opportunity to influence strategic decisions with product analytics, drive better experimentation and build online and offline ML solutions. We use a semi-embedded team structure, with data team members interfacing directly with product and engineering stakeholders. The Data Science group is made up of people from a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives, trained in fields as wide-ranging as economics, psychology, geography, physics, statistics, and operations research. We are the mathematical decision scientists for the product development organization and play a proactive and collaborative role in building and improving the product.

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.

As a Senior Data Scientist on the Search team, you will shape how neighbors find the people, places, posts, and businesses that matter to them. You will own the data science behind query understanding, content retrieval, ranking, and the end-to-end search experience — partnering closely with ML, Engineering, PM, and Design to turn intent into outcomes.

Search sits at the intersection of nearly every product surface at Nextdoor: it powers neighbor-to-neighbor discovery, connects neighbors to trusted local businesses (a core part of our marketplace and SMB strategy), and increasingly relies on LLM-driven query understanding and semantic retrieval to handle the long, conversational queries our neighbors actually ask. We are looking for an entrepreneurial, technically strong data scientist to accelerate this work and help define what "great search" means at Nextdoor.

This is an analyst + builder role. We are looking for someone who is equally comfortable digging into messy data to find the insight that reframes a problem and rolling up their sleeves to prototype, ship, and iterate on the solution alongside engineering. You should be energized by both halves of that loop — neither a pure analyst who hands off recommendations nor a pure modeler who skips the "why" — and willing to work end-to-end from question to production impact.

Successful candidates will exhibit deep technical acumen, strong product sense, and business savvy, with a passion for shipping. You are excited to go deep on ranking and recommendation systems, semantic retrieval, and the application of LLMs to query understanding and evaluation.

Your responsibilities will include:  

• Design and develop algorithms and models to optimize Search relevance, retrieval, and ranking — driving value for both neighbors and the businesses they discover
• Experiment design: ensure we run experiments efficiently and accurately, including monitoring early feature development through post-release follow-ups
• Develop and share key strategic insights through data analysis, including designing experiments and evaluating the performance and impact of data-driven content and ranking changes
• Build scalable metrics and dashboards to track Search performance and inform decisions across query understanding, retrieval, ranking, and downstream engagement
• Partner with cross-functional teams to support product development efforts (including product, design, engineering, marketing, and operations)
• Care deeply about data quality and empower employees to leverage data to help them succeed in their careers and help Nextdoor grow

• 5+ years of relevant Data Science experience
• Direct experience working on a Search, recommendations, or information retrieval product — familiarity with the core problems (query understanding, retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation) and the metrics used to measure them
• Innate curiosity around finding meaningful insights that inform how we think about and develop our product and business strategies
• Working knowledge of ML models and — more importantly — the judgment to apply them to real business problems and to devise the right metrics for evaluating algorithms and ranking systems
• Strong working knowledge of experimentation, including designing and analyzing complex product A/B testing results, with fluency in handling interaction effects and long-term metric movement
• Expert knowledge of SQL and Python, including common scientific computing packages and data science tools such as numpy, pandas, and scikit-learn
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to synthesize, simplify, and explain complex problems to different types of audiences, including executives, and compile compelling narratives

• Experience working with ranking algorithms for unstructured content
• Experience designing, deploying, or monitoring ML production models
• Basic understanding of how to build RAG systems

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create our total rewards package. Compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $175,000 - $234,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. The salary range will be determined by the candidate’s geographic location.

We also expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With quarterly vesting, your first vest date would be within the first 3 months of your start date.

When it comes to benefits, we have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee only plan option, and we also provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we serve. We encourage everyone interested in our mission to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For information about our collection and use of applicants’ personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.