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, 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.

As a member of Sidewalk’s design and product team, you will support and champion user-centered design and research as a service across the organization. You will work across all aspects of the product design cycle, including user research, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, testing, and scaling products. 

You will work closely with, and report directly to the Director of Design to work towards launching products:

• Conduct user research studies to uncover user needs, pain points, and behaviors, leading to strategic and actionable product direction.
• Ideate and iterate–create beautiful, functional and thoughtful designs that delight our customers.
• Partner deeply with Engineering, Product Managers, and the emerging field of Computational Design to deliver value to users in the urban design and development process.

Sidewalk Urban Products creates holistic planning and urban operations products for developers and cities that are invested in improving long-term outcomes (such as mobility, sustainability, and economic opportunity) so that everyone in cities can thrive.

What you have to achieve:

• In the first month, you have onboarded with the team and product, and completed a starter project that helps our users complete an element of their design and exploration workflow. You’ve absorbed our 2020 product roadmap and helped to think through what else we might need to ensure a successful launch.
• By month three, you have worked closely with our PMs and Comms team to plan and refine a basic design system that reflects the latest in our Sidewalk brand thinking. You will have several sprints (including dream sprints, where as a product team we push the envelope on what our product is capable of) under your belt, working closely with Eng on executing on the full self-service SaaS workflow.
• Six months in, you’ve been a key player and contributor to a public launch of the product, helping to translate user needs from beta customers into intuitive flows that help both developers and architects make holistic design decisions. 

What we expect:

• Obsessed with user needs
• You have 7+ years of experience in product organizations, in a UX, Product Design, or Interaction Design role. You have worked on an agile team rooted in the user-centered design process. 
• You have a degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Design, or other UX-equivalent experience.
• You are an excellent communicator who can advocate for our users both within the product and engineering teams and across the organization.
• Your design process is deeply rooted in observing user needs and creatively solving problems to improve people’s lives.
• Ability to execute with design excellence
• Have a strong base in design process and execution, including a specialty in either visual design, interaction design, and/or software development. Please share your portfolio with us. 
• You can judge and execute at the appropriate level of fidelity, from paper sketches to refined mocks for production.
• Know your tools (e.g. Figma/Sketch, Framer or equivalent, Adobe CS, HTML/CSS) and be ready to adopt new ones. Experience with Python and ML frameworks a plus.
• You are obsessed with privacy and constantly ask how we can build privacy into product design.
• Bias towards action
• Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to gain traction and begin executing.
• Employ a range of tools and materials to solve a particular problem, or get excited to learn something new when the need arises.
• Be creative: use a diverse set of tools (storyboards, wireframes, visuals, other media etc.) to communicate your ideas effectively.

• Solve problems, together
• You have experience and comfort presenting your ideas and setting up effective ways to critique and improve our work.
• You embrace the intellectual challenge of constantly reacting to and synthesizing new ideas related to the future of urban experience and technology.
• You come up with novel solutions, working well with users, urbanists and technologists.
• You ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.

• Passionate about cities
• You care deeply about cities and improving the lives of people in them.

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