Search Designer

• Search is where a neighbor tells us exactly what they need, and right now we aren’t listening well enough. Someone types in a lost dog, a neighbor’s name, last week’s school thread, or occasionally a plumber, and too often the experience leaves them guessing
• After years of under-investment, we’re rebuilding Search from the ground up with executive backing and real resources, and you’ll be the designer who shapes how it looks, feels, and behaves
• Establish the design foundation for Search: the principles, patterns, and components that let a neighbor tell at a glance whether they found what they wanted, and that give the team a common yardstick for every experiment. This is your headline deliverable for the first six months
• Design across the full Search journey, organic and sponsored together, from the entry point and typeahead through results, filters, and overall page layout
• Serve the everyday searcher first: most people are hunting for a post, a neighbor, a place, or an answer, and each of those should feel purpose-built rather than squeezed into one generic list
• Work hand in hand with data science, ML engineering, and research so that smarter ranking and query understanding show up in the interface in ways neighbors can follow, including ambiguous queries, empty results, and low-confidence matches
• Define how sponsored and organic results coexist: where ads appear, how they’re labeled, how many show up, and when a business has earned its spot
• Help the commercial side grow on local-business queries through experiences neighbors trust, treating relevance as a line revenue never crosses
• Prototype early and often, co-write test hypotheses with your PM and data partners, and let what the experiments show guide what you build next

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

• You’ve designed search or discovery before and can show the results. You think of search as a conversation rather than a list of links: what happens as someone starts typing, how very different kinds of results (posts, people, places, businesses) sit side by side, how a neighbor narrows things down, and what we say when we come up empty
• You’re also comfortable around revenue. You’ve worked beside ads and monetization teams and can design paid placements that feel like help instead of interruption. This is a long-haul effort, and you’ll have a PM, data scientists, ML engineers, and researchers working alongside you
• Clear communication across disciplines, a bias for action, and the patience and drive for a long rebuild
• Sharp consumer instincts and real curiosity about how neighbors look for local information
• Comfort designing for experimentation: framing hypotheses with PM and data science, interpreting mixed results, and recommending what ships
• A portfolio that shows full-range craft: framing the problem, interaction and visual design, prototyping, and real care for the unglamorous states like loading, empty, and error
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Java, or Xcode
• Experience partnering with ads or monetization teams, and a point of view on when paid content helps people and when it gets in their way
• Breadth across areas like growth, marketplaces, ads, or new-product work, and the adaptability to shift as priorities change
• 5+ years of product design experience, with substantial time on search, discovery, or other dense, content-heavy surfaces used by large audiences
• Enough fluency in how search works (query understanding, retrieval, ranking) to design alongside ML and LLM features, including the moments when they get things wrong
• A record of lifting engagement and revenue through design, with sound judgment about the trade-offs between them