Staff Product Manager

Role Description

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.

We're looking for a search expert who has done this before:

• Someone who has owned consumer search, made it measurably better for users, and defined the relevance and quality metrics to prove it.
• You need real commercial literacy; you've worked shoulder to shoulder with the ads and monetization side.
• Built genuine empathy for why the business needs to extract value from search.
• You know firsthand how sponsored content, ad load, and paid-organic blending actually behave.
• Great search monetization makes results better, not worse.
• You've seen engagement and revenue grow together when both sides pull in the same direction.

This is a multi-year rebuild rather than a tuning exercise, and you won't do it alone:

• Dedicated data science partners, ML engineers with search backgrounds, and design coverage are committed to the team.
• Ideally, you've also built beyond search and bring the range of a generalist athlete who can flex across consumer, marketplace, and business-facing problems.
• You'll partner closely with engineering, data science, research, design, and PMM to turn that thinking into shipped experiments with real, measurable impact.

At Nextdoor, we operate in an AI-first environment and expect every team member to actively use AI tools as part of their workflow.

Impact

• 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.
• Partner with dedicated data science and ML engineering on query understanding, retrieval, and ranking.
• Design how organic and sponsored content blend on the page, including placement, ad load, relevance thresholds, and monetization-eligibility routing.
• Grow revenue on the minority of queries with commercial intent, connecting neighbors to local businesses through organic and sponsored placements.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of product management experience, including deep ownership of consumer search at scale.
• Working knowledge of information retrieval fundamentals, including query understanding, retrieval, and ranking.
• 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.
• A track record of growing engagement and revenue together.
• Strong consumer product instincts built from shipping experiences used at scale.
• A strong track record designing and analyzing A/B tests.
• Range beyond search: you've shipped in adjacent areas like growth, marketplace, ads, or 0-to-1 products.
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills, a bias toward action.

Requirements

• Genuine curiosity about how neighbors search for and find local information.
• Judgment to know when monetization improves the user experience and when it degrades it.
• Appetite for a multi-year rebuild rather than a quick optimization win.

Benefits

• Compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications.
• The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $170,000 - $250,000 on an annualized basis.
• We expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role.
• Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee-only plan option.
• We provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.