Software Engineer

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. We create products, invest in new companies, and help plan innovative places around the world. Since our founding in 2015, we’ve grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York City. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

We’ve launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on projects such as factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

Over the past five years, we have built a unique team of urbanists and technologists who have developed a vision for what this neighborhood of the future will be and how it will function:

• A mobility system that is safer and more convenient than the private car at much lower cost;
• A new standard of sustainability creating buildings that proactively manage and reduce energy by over 20%;
• A close-knit community that uses data to improve city services;
• Housing and real estate that is more efficient and thus far more affordable;
• Open digital infrastructure that inspires innovation.

As a software engineer, you will work across the organization and use technology to inform our decisions and bring this vision to life. We must create innovative products that will push the boundaries of traditional thinking in urban environments while protecting user privacy and security. This will involve solving complex computational problems, dealing with messy sources of data, and building systems which scale.

Our software engineers are utility players who will support different product areas. You will work across software and hardware, and develop deep partnerships with our UX designers, product managers, and subject matter experts (e.g. architecture, housing affordability, mobility) to deliver products to unlock the true potential of a place.

We encourage engineers with full-time experience to apply, and will determine your level within Sidewalk Labs based on merit and interview performance. 

What you have to achieve:

• Within your first month, you build a deep understanding of Sidewalk Labs’ current initiatives and technology infrastructure (Python, Go and TypeScript running on the Google Cloud Platform/Kubernetes), coding style and standards, and have contributed code to the repository.
• By the end of month 3, you should have added features to our existing projects, and prototyped at least one new idea.
• From there your role will be continue to evolve – we’re still a small team. Some projects will be ad hoc, or you might be part of a longer-term initiative. The types of problems we are trying to solve could include:
  • How can technology support city leaders and planners understand their city and make good decisions?
  • How do we use technologies like self-driving cars, pervasive networking and widespread environmental sensors to maximize their positive impact on the future of the city?
  • How can we build digital products that help urban populations stay healthy and happy?
  • How can we make a city that gives back to the environment?

What leads to success:

• Know your software engineering.
  • Have a strong CS background in order to choose the right algorithms, systems approaches and patterns to solve problems, without reinventing the wheel.
  • Candidates need to be able to hit the ground running. Therefore, we generally look for 2+ years of full-time industry experience.
  • Experience with Python and at least one systems programming language (C++, Java, or Go). Experience with Google Cloud Platform and/or Kubernetes a plus.
• Act as a technologist.
  • Bias towards action and shipping. Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to a prototype to prove the concept.
  • Strong ability to write production code quickly.
  • You are obsessed with privacy and constantly ask how we can build privacy into product design.
  • Be comfortable with a range of languages and open source tools and frameworks, and make good decisions about which to use to solve a particular problem. You are excited to learn something new when the need arises.
  • Be creative: you’ll come up with new ideas based on your broad understanding of technological possibilities and city domain knowledge.
• Solve problems, together.
  • Come up with novel solutions, working well with technologists and non-technologists alike.
  • Ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.
  • Have flexibility to work on the team’s most pressing problems.
• Care.
  • About cities, solving hard problems, and our team’s success.

The community of the future is a place for everyone, and Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to apply. All employment is based on merit and business need.