Lead, Design

Job description

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 .

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 Design Leader 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.

Responsibilities

• Running weekly design critiques and rebuilding a healthy manager-level review process so projects of every size get rigorous feedback at the right altitude
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of product designers, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment. 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

Requirements

• 10+ 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 supportive leadership style that cultivates team growth and success.
• 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