Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company tackling the challenges of urban growth. Our vision for cities is rooted in a cross-disciplinary approach that is reflected in our team, composed of experts from real estate, government, finance, technology, engineering and more. Since its founding in 2015, Sidewalk Labs has evolved into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York and Toronto.

We are currently designing a new kind of mixed-use, complete community on Toronto’s waterfront in partnership with the tripartite agency Waterfront Toronto and the local community. This joint effort, called Sidewalk Toronto, will combine forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology to create a people-centered neighborhood that achieves precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.

We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it.

What is the role?

Our designers are utility players who will support different product areas. You will work across software and hardware, and develop deep partnerships with our software engineers, product managers, and subject matter experts focused on sustainability and mobility systems to deliver technology products to unlock the true potential of a place. You will travel to Toronto to listen, learn, and partner directly with the community in conjunction with the Sidewalk Toronto project. 

You will be a member of Sidewalk’s design and product team, supporting 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 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.
• Translate research into beautiful, functional and thoughtful designs.
• Prototype interactions across platforms (from screens to environments) with an understanding of how design excellence supports the broader end-to-end user experience.

You will work with a team focused on achieving new standards for sustainability and climate-positivity, as well as a team designing a mobility system that will offer a competitive, safer alternative to the private car for every trip. From a product perspective, you will work on everything from optimization engines for buildings to technologies that help coordinate the movement of traffic to maximize the free-flow of people and goods.

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 (Sketch, Framer, Adobe CS, HTML/CSS) and be ready to adopt new ones.
• 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 the 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.