---
title: 'Lead, Design at Nextdoor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-design-nextdoor-san-francisco-1g04n4nwpyjn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Lead, Design at Nextdoor

- **Company:** Nextdoor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://about.nextdoor.com/careers-list/?gh_jid=8140473

## Job description

#TeamNextdoor

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](http://nextdoor.com/).

Meet Your Future Neighbors

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 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.

The Impact You’ll Make

Are you excited by the challenge of raising the craft bar for a design team, coaching designers toward their next level, and still shipping hands-on work yourself? If so, this is the role for you. Please include a portfolio link along with your resume.

Your responsibilities will include:

- Running weekly design critiques and rebuilding a healthy manager-level review process so projects of every size get rigorous feedback at the right altitude
- Establishing regular 1:1s and growth plans for a team of consumer designers, and advocating for their growth and promotion during performance review cycles
- Owning the design capacity model across seven product areas, managing a team of 5 to 6 consumer designers. Owning the capacity model and the recommendation on where design headcount goes
- Representing 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
- Arbitrating design-system exceptions, deciding when to say no to a one-off component that doesn't belong in our shared design system
- Shipping hands-on design work yourself on at least one high-impact area of the consumer product
- Participating in in-person Nextdoor events such as trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and team building exercises
- Building in-person relationships with team members and contributing 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

## What You’ll Bring To The Team

- 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

Join us to design products that make a real-world impact, strengthening communities and bringing people closer together.

Rewards

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$240,000 to $275,000 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 expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With quarterly vesting, your first vest date will take place within 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](https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/Personnel-Privacy-Policy?language=en_US).

## About Nextdoor

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nextdoor is the essential neighborhood network that connects neighbors, local businesses, and public agencies to build stronger local communities.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: KIND)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, United States
- **Founded**: 2011
- **Founders**: Nirav Tolia (CEO, President, Chairperson) — co-founders also include others such as Prakash Janakiraman and David Sze

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Social networking, local community platform
- Target customers: B2C (neighbors/residents), B2B (local businesses), B2G (public agencies, fire departments, news publishers)
- Mission or purpose statement: "To make every neighborhood feel like home."

## Products & Services
- **Nextdoor Platform (The New Nextdoor)**: Mobile app and website that offers:
  - **News**: Trusted local stories from vetted publishers (3,500+ partners in US, UK, Canada)
  - **Alerts**: Real-time safety, traffic, and weather alerts powered by Weather.com, Samdesk, and local public agencies
  - **Ask**: AI-powered recommendations distilled from years of neighborhood conversations
  - **For Sale & Free**: Hyperlocal marketplace for buying, selling, or giving away items
  - **Events and Groups**: Organize and discover local gatherings and interest-based groups
  - **Business Pages**: 5M+ claimed business pages where locals can engage with enterprises
  - **Public Agency Pages**: 6,000+ public agencies use the platform to share critical updates

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available from search results (publicly traded, but specific market cap not cited)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $257.6M (as of latest available data)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Partners include Weather.com, Samdesk, and thousands of local news publishers and public agencies. (Specific venture investors not listed in search results)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 110M+ verified neighbors across 345,000 neighborhoods globally
  - 1 in 3 U.S. households rely on Nextdoor
  - Present in 11 countries
  - Launched "The New Nextdoor" in July 2025, introducing AI-powered Ask feature
  - Employee headcount: 555 (+0.9% YoY, +9 employees)
  - Active job postings: 18 (but decreasing trend -35.7% monthly)

## Competitive Advantages
- Hyperlocal, verified network: users must submit real names and addresses, building inherent trust
- Large existing user base and network effects across neighborhoods
- Deep integration with local public agencies, fire departments, and news publishers
- AI-powered "Ask" feature leverages years of community data to provide unique local insights
- Diverse revenue streams: advertising, business pages, and marketplace

## Strategic Focus
- Monetization through advertising (multiple machine learning roles in Ads, Product Manager for Ads Optimization)
- Expanding AI capabilities in feed and notifications (Senior ML Engineer - Notifications/Feed)
- Growing marketplace and local commerce (For Sale & Free)
- Strengthening partnerships with public agencies and local news
- Increasing engagement through events, groups, and the new feature suite

## Why Work Here
- Culture & Values: "Act Like An Owner", "Build For Community", "Raise The Bar"
- Extensive benefits: health care (including LGBTQ+ affirming care), flexible vacation, 401k match, ESPP, 16 weeks paid parental leave, mental health & wellness stipend, caregiving support
- Perks: Meals and snacks in office, volunteer programs, career development resources
- Employee Resource Groups: 10 active ERGs including MIND (mental health), Rainbowhood (LGBTQ+), B@ND (Black employees), WIN (women & gender minorities), Halal, and more
- Work environment: Hybrid/remote flexibility implied (Slack usage, office perks), small-ish team (~555 employees) with engineering roles open (iOS, backend, ML, data science)
- Opportunity to work on a product that impacts 110M neighbors and fosters real-world community connections

## Sources
1. [about.nextdoor.com/careers](https://about.nextdoor.com/careers/)
2. [about.nextdoor.com](https://about.nextdoor.com/)
3. [linkedin.com/company/nextdoor-com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nextdoor-com)
4. [about.nextdoor.com/team](https://about.nextdoor.com/team/)
5. [wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextdoor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextdoor)

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