Data Scientist (Search)

Role overview

Join Nextdoor as a Senior Data Scientist on the Search team. You will own the data science that powers the end-to-end search experience—helping neighbors find relevant people, places, posts, and businesses.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop algorithms and models to improve search relevance, retrieval, and ranking.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, marketing, operations) to support product development.
• Produce and share strategic insights using data analysis, including:
  • Experiment design
  • Performance evaluation of ranking and search systems.

Requirements

• Strong judgment to apply ML to real business problems and to define the right metrics for ranking/relevance.
• Expert-level SQL and Python, with experience using common data science/scientific computing tools (e.g., NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn).
• 5+ years of relevant Data Science experience.
• Direct experience with Search, recommendations, or information retrieval products (query understanding, retrieval, ranking, relevance evaluation) and the associated metrics.
• Strong experimentation skills, including designing and analyzing complex A/B tests, handling interaction effects, and measuring long-term metric movement.
• Excellent communication skills (ability to synthesize and explain complex problems to varied audiences, including executives).
• Experience designing, deploying, or monitoring ML production models.
• Experience working with ranking algorithms for unstructured content.
• Basic understanding of RAG systems.

Nice-to-haves

• Not explicitly stated beyond the listed requirements (RAG understanding, unstructured ranking, ML production).