What is the role?

As a software engineer, you will use your significant technology expertise to solve problems faced by cities worldwide.

You will be a key member of Sidewalk’s Delve team, helping build a product that solves complex problems in urban design, masterplanning, and real estate development. Our 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.

For more information, please see the product's website here.

We encourage engineers with full-time experience to apply, and will determine your level within Sidewalk Labs based on interview performance. We unfortunately will not be hiring upcoming college graduates at this time. 

What you have to achieve:

• Within your first month, you build a deep understanding of Sidewalk Labs’ current initiatives and technology infrastructure (Python, Go and Typescript running on the Google Cloud Platform/Kubernetes), coding style and standards, and have contributed code to the repository.
• By the end of month 3, you should have added features to our existing projects, and prototyped at least one new idea.
• From there your role will continue to evolve – we’re still a small team. The types of problems we are trying to solve could include:
• How can we clearly build complex and dynamic 3D visuals of urban design that dramatically improve the work of experts and the understanding of non-expert users?
• How can we build a participatory planning tool that responds to community needs?
• Can we study and understand centuries of what’s made a city or neighborhood successful through machine learning techniques on open datasets?

What we expect:

• Know your software engineering.
• Have a strong CS background in order to choose the right algorithms, systems approaches and patterns to solve problems, without reinventing the wheel.
• Candidates need to be able to hit the ground running. Therefore,  we generally look for 2+ years of industry experience in a world-class engineering organization.
• Experience with Python or JavaScript. Experience with Google Cloud Platform and/or Kubernetes a plus.
• Act as a technologist.
• Bias towards action and shipping. Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to a prototype to prove the concept.
• Strong ability to write production code quickly.
• You are obsessed with privacy and constantly ask how we can build privacy into product design.
• Be comfortable with a range of languages and open source tools and frameworks, and make good decisions about which to use to solve a particular problem. You are excited to learn something new when the need arises. 
• Be creative: you’ll come up with new ideas based on your broad understanding of technological possibilities and city domain knowledge.
• Solve problems, together.
• Come up with novel solutions, working well with technologists and non-technologists alike.
• Ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.
• Have flexibility to work on the team’s most pressing problems.
• Care. 
• About cities, solving hard problems, and our team’s success.
• You are committed to creating more equitable and inclusive outcomes both in the workplace and in the work you do.

Are you a software engineer interested in Sidewalk Labs, but are not sure this is the right role for you? No worries, please apply to our generalist position here. All applicants will be considered for any open position on our teams.