Data Scientist - Search

About the Role

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Skills

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

Pay

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.