Architecture / Urban Planning - Customer Success Consultant

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, supporting external customers as they use our product to solve problems in urban design, district planning, and real estate development. Delve 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 have a key customer success role on the team, and will work directly with external users in development, design and planning firms to apply our tools to their problems and drive decision-making. You will also work closely with product, design and engineering members of the team to share user needs and inform our core product.

• Apply our generative design tool to solve customer needs, and configure the tool as needed for project requirements
• Document work, analyze results and communicate insights to customers
• Translate broad project briefs into optimization problems suitable for the product
• Provide domain expertise and knowledge in urban, design, planning and real estate development
• Help identify and scope more complex technical features for our product and engineering team, based on customer needs.
• Implement features and tools when needed to produce results for customers

This is a full-time, but fixed-term position running through the end of 2021. This means full benefits (paid time off, health insurance, 401k matching, etc.). Sidewalk Labs is 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 office.

You must be authorized to work in the United States. 

What you have to achieve:

• Within the first month, you know our product and internal tools inside-and-out. You can confidently configure and apply the product to new sites and projects.
• You’ve onboarded into a customer project and have established strong working relationships with key stakeholders and users. You’ve also mapped out the project phasing based on pre-existing and new contract requirements.
• At the end of three months, you will have satisfied customer needs by delivering and documenting finished results from the tool for a project. You’ve also mapped out ways for our team and product to accommodate multiple customers efficiently, and started to scope and share those improvements with the rest of the team. 
• At the end of six months, you will have completed a project and produced relevant case study material for future customers. You will share internal processes and make recommendations for improvements as we scale. You will be fully integrated into our product team and can share expertise and make specific technical contributions where necessary.

What we expect:

Expertise in computational and urban design

• You have 2+ years of experience in architecture, urban planning and/or real estate development in: applying computational design methods, early- and mid-phase design, district-scale development and customer interaction.
• You have comfort working across design software (Rhino / Grasshopper) and GIS, and are familiar with code (Python / Pandas / GeoPandas). Most importantly, you know how to make technical solutions clear and useful for others.
• You have a degree in Urban Design, Architecture, Urban Planning or Computational Design, or have equivalent professional experience.
  

Action-oriented

• 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.
• Put the customer first! As a dedicated customer success computational designer, you’ll use our existing tools but must be willing and able to close the gaps when needed to satisfy customer project requirements.

Solve problems, together

• You are a proven collaborator and communicator; you know how to listen to customer needs and present solutions that improve end-user value (and don’t just make the biggest splash in the room). 
• You can come up with novel solutions, working well with 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.
• You are committed to creating more equitable and inclusive outcomes both in the workplace and in the work you do.

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 with real estate development and finance
• Experience using statistics and data science to gain insight on design problems
• Experience with sales and business development
• Experience working on a digital product team in product design or user research roles
• Experience with human-centered design

Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.