Staff Product Manager, Search

About the role

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. 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.

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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• Nextdoor