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?

As a software engineer on the mobility team, you will apply your significant technology expertise to solve problems in mobility faced by cities and towns worldwide. If you’ve ever mused over the origins of a stop-and-start traffic jam, puzzled about how to make a local train run faster, or wondered how a single traffic light can be tuned to not generate a line of traffic miles down the road, you might be right for the Sidewalk Labs mobility team.

We’re a small company with a very broad mission, so you’ll need to work with people from a wide range of disciplines to achieve our goals. We must create innovative products that will push the boundaries of traditional thinking in urban environments while protecting user privacy and security. This will involve solving complex computational problems, dealing with messy sources of data, and building systems which scale.

Mobility technology involves working across software, firmware and custom hardware (though you needn’t be an expert in all three), and developing deep partnerships with our UX designers, product managers, mobility experts and city partners to deliver products that change the way we move around. You will travel to Toronto to listen, learn, and partner directly with the community in conjunction with the Sidewalk Toronto project. This is not a standard software engineering position.

This is a large discipline. Some of our challenges involve simulating new ways that to make mobility networks run more efficiently, building novel sensors, using the latest in machine learning to extract signals from large data sets while removing all hints of personal information.

We encourage engineers of all experience levels to apply, and will determine your level within Sidewalk Labs based on merit and interview performance.

What you have to achieve:

• Within your first month, you build a deep understanding of Sidewalk Labs’ current initiatives and technology infrastructure (Python, Go, C/C++ 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. Some projects will be ad hoc, or you might be part of a longer-term initiative. The types of problems we are trying to solve could include:
• How can software and hardware make transportation more efficient, more affordable and faster than ever before?
• How can technology help reduce congestion, move freight, or reduce the time drivers spend searching for parking?
• How we share mobility data as openly as possible while protecting the privacy of everybody whose movements contributed to that data?
• How do we use technologies like self-driving cars, ubiquitous networking and widespread environmental sensors to maximize their positive impact on the future of the city?
• How can we help cities better understand mobility, and then support their efforts to make it better?
• How can we make a city that gives back to the environment?

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 is required.
• Experience with Python and at least one systems programming language (C++, Java, or Go). 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.

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

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.