Data Scientist - Search

#Team Nextdoor 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 . Meet Your Future Neighbors 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. The Impact You’ll Make 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