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?
You will be a key member of Sidewalk’s Delve team, helping scale a product that solves complex problems in urban design, masterplanning, and real estate development. The Delve 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 neighborhood development.
It’s your job to get Delve customers.
In our current engagement model, Delve customers get access to the Delve tool and dedicated guidance from a Sidewalk Labs computational designer who becomes an extended member of the customer’s team, becoming an expert with the project site objectives and constraints, inputting these into the tool. Over the course of the engagement, thousands of design options are generated and scored, with feedback solicited from the customer on a weekly basis, to further inform the generative process, refine the scoring, and improve the outputs. The customer’s Delve license extends for months following the engagement’s close, enabling iteration and interaction within the tool beyond the scope of Sidewalk Labs’ direct support.
Our initial customers are real estate developers, and you can speak their language. Not only do you understand the ins and outs of their day-to-day work, the deadlines they care about, and the stakeholders they need to manage, but you can anticipate their concerns, and more importantly, their enthusiasm. You know what makes the master planning process unique, and, while reading this job description, you have already thought of two dozen people in your network to whom you’ll want to reach out in your first week on the job. Your compensation structure will reward you for deals closed.
Working with Delve also proactively involves managing a multitude of stakeholders, from the design firm, to the developer who engages with the city to grant permitting authority, to the neighbors who will be affected by the development, to the neighborhood’s future residents and business tenants. You care about each of these stakeholder groups and can put yourself in their shoes, understanding and empathetically addressing their needs, their wants, and their concerns. You are ready to share this feedback with the product team in a way that allows the product to properly meet customer needs. Delve excites you because of its promise not only to completely revolutionize the development process, but also because you know that it will result in more sustainable, more affordable cities that serve people first.
For more on Delve see our intro video.
Note: We are currently working remotely, and we expect to eventually re-open our offices when it is safe to return, in 2021. After re-opening, candidates will be expected to come into the New York office.
What will you achieve?
Within the first three months, you will:
Within the first six months, you will:
Within the first twelve months, you will:
What we expect:
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.