Data Scientist - Feed (Senior)

#TeamNextdoor

Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.

Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 305,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Meet Your Future Neighbors

As Data Scientists at Nextdoor, we design and oversee product experiments, own complex analyses to drive company and product strategy, and deploy online and offline models to a production environment. 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 comprises people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, trained in fields as wide-ranging as psychology, geology, physics, and statistics. We are the mathematical decision scientists for their product development organization and play an active and collaborative role in building and improving the product.

At Nextdoor, we offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment experience, providing a flexible experience for our valued employees.

The Impact You'll Make

As a Data Scientist on the Feed team, you will focus on the way our content is delivered to neighbors by using data-driven insights in close collaboration with our ML engineering team and Infrastructure teams. Developing models to understand user engagement, causal effects, and content ecosystem. You will define and own the ways we measure success for the team.

Feed is the centerpiece of Nextdoor's content consumption model. It overlaps with almost every other team including Ads, Notifications and Growth (user acquisition). We are looking for an entrepreneurial and driven data scientist to accelerate our efforts and be a major part of our data-centric culture. This person will work closely with various cross-functional teams such as product, engineering, sales & finance to develop and deliver metrics, analyses, solutions, and insights.

Successful candidates will exhibit technical acumen, product sense and business savvy, with a passion for making an impact through timely execution. You are keen on building a deeper understanding into ML algorithms and ranking/recommendation systems.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Improving our ranking system: Leverage statistics, time series analysis, ML, and NLP to extract and represent valuable insights
• Experiment design: Make sure we run experiments efficiently and accurately, including monitoring early feature development through tracking post-release follow-ups
• Develop and share key strategic insights through data analysis, evaluating the performance and impact of the product team
• Build scalable metrics and dashboards to inform product strategy
• Partner with cross-functional teams to support product development efforts (including product, design, engineering, marketing, operations, and sales)
• Care deeply about data quality and empowering employees to leverage data to help them succeed in their careers and help Nextdoor grow
• Participate in in-person Nextdoor events, trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and other team building exercises
• Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to the KIND culture that Nextdoor values

What You'll Bring To The Team

• 4+ years of relevant work experience. MS or PhD in a quantitative discipline: statistics, operations research, computer science, engineering, applied mathematics, physics, economics, etc.
• Experience in applied statistics and statistical modeling in at least one statistical software package, preferably Python
• Experience in designing trustworthy experimentation and analyzing complex product a/b testing results
• Deep understanding of ML models and preferably experience in production model deployment
• Expert knowledge of SQL and Python, 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
• Ability to solve ambiguous business problems with a structured analytics framework
• Innate curiosity around finding meaningful insights that inform how we think about and develop our product and business strategies

Bonus Points

• Experience working with ranking algorithms for unstructured content
• Experience designing, deploying or monitoring ML production models

Rewards

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create one overall rewards package.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $122,000 - $201,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. Compensation may also vary by geography.

We also expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With equal quarterly vesting, your first vest date would be within the first 3 months of your start date.

Overall, total compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications. We have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of great health plans. We cover 100% of your personal monthly premium for health, dental, and vision – and provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we seek to serve. We encourage everyone interested in our purpose to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For information about our collection and use of applicants' personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.

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