Computational Designer - Customer Success

| Greater NYC Area
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Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company with a mission to radically improve urban life. We aim to create inclusive, large-scale communities by bringing together an innovative planning approach, products and services designed to address urban challenges, and capital for real estate and advanced infrastructure. 

Since our founding in 2015, we've grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York and Toronto. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

To date, we've incubated and invested in multiple companies focused on solving city problems, and we've launched the Sidewalk Toronto project, which aims to create a community along Toronto's waterfront that achieves new standards of sustainability, affordability, and economic opportunity for all.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for inclusive growth, our work is both highly 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 generative design team, supporting external clients to use our product to solve 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 a client services computational designer on the team and will work directly with external clients 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.

You will:

  • Apply our generative design tool to solve client optimization problems, and customize the tool for self-service
  • Document work, analyze results and communicate insights to clients
  • Translate broad design briefs and projects into suitable optimization problems
  • Provide domain expertise and design knowledge in urban masterplanning, design and real estate development
  • Implement the necessary features and tools to produce results for clients
  • Help identify and scope more complex technical features for our software engineering team, based on client needs

This is a full-time contract with benefits running through the end of 2020.

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.
  • You’ve onboarded into a client project and have established strong working relationships with key stakeholders. You’ve also mapped out the project phasing based on pre-existing and new contract requirements.
  • At the end of month three, you will have satisfied client needs by delivering work-in-progress and documenting more finished results from the tool for a project. You’ve also mapped out ways for our team and tool to accommodate multiple clients efficiently, and started to scope and share those improvements with the rest of the team. 
  • Beyond the first few months, you will have completed a project and produced relevant case study material for future clients. You will share internal process 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 3+ 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 client interaction.
  • You have comfort working across and between all matter of GIS, design software (Rhino, Grasshopper) and code (Python) — and know how to use diverse technical methods to make things clear and useful for others.
  • You have a degree in Urban Design, Architecture, Urban Planning or Computational Design, 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 scrappy! As our first dedicated client services computational designer, you’ll need to use our existing tools but also be willing to close existing gaps with custom solutions you make yourself.

Solve problems, together

  • You are a proven collaborator and communicator; you know how to listen to client 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.

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 product design or user research roles
  • Experience with human-centered design
  • Experience using statistics and data science to gain insight on design problems


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.

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Location

We are located in Hudson Yards, Manhattan's newest neighborhood, at the intersection of 30th Street and 10th Avenue.

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