Lead, Design

Lead, Design

San Francisco, CA

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 nload the app and join the neighborhood at

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.

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

• 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…