Staff Data Scientist - Content Growth & Creator Strategy

Job description

#TeamNextdoor 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. Meet Your Future Neighbors As a Data Scientist at Nextdoor, you will help design and oversee product experiments and own complex analyses to drive company and product strategy. We use a semi-embedded team structure, in which a group of data team members works on a specific product or pillar, interfacing directly with product and engineering stakeholders. The Data Science group consists of people from a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives, trained in fields as wide-ranging as economics, physics, statistics, and operations research. We are an integral part of the product development organization and play an active and collaborative role in building and improving the product. 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. The Impact You'll Make We are looking for a Staff Data Scientist to accelerate execution on priority content investments and elevate the quality of product decision-making. This person will provide end-to-end data science ownership for new and emerging surfaces such as Video, Groups, and Events—areas with limited historical data that require strong product sense, pattern recognition, rapid hypothesis generation, rigorous diagnosis, and fast iteration. They will evaluate feature performance, including through non-standard A/B tests; identify opportunities to grow content supply, contributors, and engagement; partner with Distribution to improve discovery; and connect insights across surfaces to drive portfolio-level impact. The role will also own the data architecture and quality requirements for content data assets spanning supply, creators, viewers, entities, content types, and surfaces. This includes evolving legacy structures, identifying coverage and quality gaps, and partnering with Analytics Engineering to build and maintain source-of-truth tables and artifacts—an increasingly important foundation for reliable agentic analytics. Finally, we need a working statistician with strong theoretical training and practical experience to restore expertise in quasi-experiments, network experimentation with bias controls, and other sophisticated methods, ensuring the team can distinguish true product impact from confounding factors while maintaining both rigor and velocity. Your responsibilities will include: • Partner with cross-functional teams - including product management, design, engineering, research - to support product development efforts • Experiments: design and measure experiments to inform feature decisions • Develop key strategic insights through exploratory data analysis to inform future investments or pivot in strategy • Build scalable metrics and dashboards to empower efficient decision-making at Nextdoor • Participate in in-person Nextdoor events such as trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and team-building exercises • Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to Nextdoor's company culture What You'll Bring To The Team • Staff-level Data Scientist or Tech Lead experience, ideally within the social media or consumer technology space • Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Statistics • Demonstrated expertise in non-randomized A/B testing, network testing, and advanced causal inference methods • Experience owning end-to-end product analytics, from identifying opportunities and shaping strategy through launching and measuring new features • Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with a track record of building effective working relationships with Product, Engineering, and other partners • The ability to operate as an autonomous technical leader and influence product direction through rigorous analysis, experimentation, and clear communication • Expert knowledge of SQL and Python programming, including common scientific computing packages and data science tools such as numpy, pandas, and scikit-learn • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to synthesize, simplify, and explain complex problems to different types of audiences, including executives, and compile compelling narratives • Eagerness to explore and apply AI and emerging technologies to reimagine how work gets done Rewards Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create our total rewards package. Compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications. The starting base salary for this role is expected to range from $190,000 to $283,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. The salary range will be determined by the candidate’s geographic location. We expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With quarterly vesting, your first vest date will take place within 3 months of your start date. When it comes to benefits, we have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered e