Design Lead

• 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

Benefits

• Monthly wellness stipend
• 12 weeks of parental, family or medical leave
• Global end of year shutdown
• Learning and development stipend
• Work from home opportunities
• Health insurance- Are you excited by the challenge of raising the craft bar for a design team, leading designers toward their next level, and still shipping hands-on work yourself? If so, this is the role for you
• Fluency with AI-assisted design tooling and a clear sense of where it helps and where it can’t substitute for human judgment
• Proficiency in Figma and other design tools for creating wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs
• A supportive leadership style that cultivates team growth and success
• Join us to design products that make a real-world impact, strengthening communities and bringing people closer together
• Strong understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods, with the ability to synthesize insights into actionable design decisions
• Calibrated craft judgment: you can run a crit, make a leveling call, and defend it in calibration
• Comfort holding a design position in rooms with executives, backed by evidence rather than taste
• Experience working with and contributing to design systems, ensuring consistency and scalability across surfaces
• 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- Please include a portfolio link along with your resume