Lead, Design

About the role

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 offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment model, blending in-office presence and work-from-home experience for our valued employees.

Responsibilities

• Run weekly design critiques and rebuild a healthy manager-level review process so projects of every size get rigorous feedback at the right altitude
• Establish regular 1:1s and growth plans for a team of consumer designers, and advocate for their growth and promotion during performance review cycles
• Own the design capacity model across seven product areas, managing a team of 5 to 6 consumer designers. Own the capacity model and the recommendation on where design headcount goes
• Represent 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
• Arbitrate design-system exceptions, deciding when to say no to a one-off component that doesn't belong in our shared design system
• Ship hands-on design work yourself on at least one high-impact area of the consumer product
• Participate in in-person Nextdoor events such as trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and team-building exercises
• Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to Nextdoor's company culture

This role reports directly to the EVP of Product and is the senior-most design voice in the Consumer org.

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

Benefits

• Choice between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee-only plan option
• OneMedical membership for concierge care

Pay

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $240,000 to $275,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater if your level of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. The salary range will be determined by the candidate’s geographic location. We expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role with quarterly vesting, with your first vest date taking place within 3 months of your start date.