All Things Urban

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company that tackles cities' greatest challenges. We create products and solutions, invest in new companies, and help developers build more sustainable, innovative, and equitable places around the world. Our ambitious vision requires us to push ourselves beyond conventional thinking, and we work hard in pursuit of our mission. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds. Our urban innovations include Delve (a generative design product that empowers real estate teams to design better, faster, with less risk), Mesa (an easy-install kit for commercial buildings that cuts energy costs, improves tenant comfort, and simplifies building operations), Pebble (a low-cost vehicle sensor to help manage parking and curb space), and Affordable Electrification (a new way to manage home energy use to meet a customer’s monthly budget). We're also developing an offsite construction company that can deliver high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working. With the potential to radically improve quality of life in cities for all, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

You will be a key member of Sidewalk’s generative design team, helping build a product that solves complex problems in urban design, masterplanning, and real estate development. Our generative design team is committed to radically improving the quality of urban life through better digital design tools — and we’re bridging the urbanist-technologist divide by combining expertise in machine learning, optimization and cloud computation with a nuanced understanding of why and how the design of a city’s physical form matters. You will be computational designer contributing to core product development on the team, and will collaborate closely with our engineering and design team to build new features and functionality that solves user needs. - Build generative algorithms that create detailed and diverse design options for urban form - Create functions the use simulation, geospatial data and geometry information to evaluate design options - Research and test how best to apply computation — parametricism, machine learning and data-driven modeling — to urban design - Collaborate with engineering team members to implement productionized features - Collaborate with design team members to produce supporting documentation and visual assets for users - Prototype quick solutions to user problems as needed - Provide domain expertise and design knowledge in urban masterplanning, design and real estate development This is a full time position. What you have to achieve: - Within the first month, you know our product and tools in and out based on discussion with product, design and engineering. You can confidently customize and apply the tool to new sites and projects, and are fully onboarded into our version control and software development practices. - At the end of month three, you will have pushed our product forward with prototypes and implemented features. You have added code to generate more sophisticated design options and evaluations, that can meet the demands and constraints of real-world projects. - Beyond the first few months, you will have helped lead research efforts to identify at least one new technological opportunity for the product, in partnership with engineering, design and product management.

Expertise in computational and urban design: - You have 3+ years of experience applying computational design methods to architecture, urban design, planning and/or real estate development. - You have comfort working across and between all matter of GIS, design software (Rhino, Grasshopper) and code (Python) — and experience developing custom design tools and workflows. - You have experience applying statistics, data science, machine learning, simulation or modeling to problems of design and the built environment. - You have a degree in Urban Design, Architecture, Urban Planning, Computational Design, Computer Science or have equivalent professional experience. Bias towards action: - You love to dive into spatial design problems, and care about everything from critical details to the big-picture questions. You enjoy the challenge of iterative, evolving projects. - Be an advocate for design! As a computational designer on the team, you’ll need to identify critical areas for improvement, opportunities for new features in a broader market of software solutions, and build prototypes to prove your point. Solve problems, together: - You are a proven collaborator and communicator; you know how to listen to and work well with experts from the same and other disciplines. - You can come up with novel solutions that solve for the problems of both urbanists and technologists. - You know how to admit what you don’t know, and how to ask the right people on the team for help. - You thrive working in complex environments with many internal and external stakeholders. Passionate about cities: - Demonstrated curiosity for the urban environment and care deeply about improving the lives of people in cities. - You live and breath design and computation, but you believe that urban environments are the complex result of many other processes and disciplines. Bonus points: - Experience working on a digital product team in engineering roles - Experience with agile software development

Unfortunately, it seems like this job is not available for international candidates. Unless you’re eligible for a work visa otherwise, please double-check with the company.