Who are we?

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

We’ve launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

Sidewalk’s Sustainability team works at the technical heart of Sidewalk’s mission, developing tangible solutions to minimize the operating cost of low carbon neighborhoods in order to make them economically accessible to all communities.

The team marries real estate development, buildings systems and infrastructure-financing expertise with technology to vision, pilot, and commercialize product and business solutions for real estate developers, utilities and managed communities.  

The team is currently in the early stages of commercializing a set of tools and design strategies centered on reducing the cost of electrification on communities called Affordable Electrification.  The team is piloting the tools, securing early customers and building the foundations of a business intended to exceed 250 million dollars of revenue per year.  This is expected to be the first in a series of businesses that the group will spawn over the next ten years.

We are looking for a Senior Associate, who will report directly to the group leader, Charlotte. In this role, you are expected to be a utility player who takes initiative and solves problems with little guidance. Your work will stretch building design,operations, and customer engagements, all to help manage the assessment and deployment of Sidewalk Lab’s sustainability tools into new and existing neighborhoods. 

You will work directly with real estate developers interested in low carbon development who could become, and are ultimately secured, as customers for the team’s products. You will be an ambassador, coordinator, project manager and market touch point for the team. You will play an important role in developing the market for low carbon development and shaping the team’s product to serve that market. 

Day-to-day responsibilities will include:

• Work with Sidewalk Labs’ Inbound team to identify suitable customers for the Sustainability team’s offering, engaging with these customers and crafting appropriate engagements for each.
• Identify, scope and manage partner consultants who augment the Sustainability team’s capacity to work with customers, particularly developers. 
• Manage engagements with real estate customers, including all consultants.  You will be supported by AE’s Directors in this work.
• Craft the tools, documents and checklists that can be repurposed for each engagement, and instruct the team on what the market requires as you test different solutions and learn.
• Communicate learnings from the customer to the product development and business commercialization teams to help shape our product and business offering to achieve our goals.

Key Results

After 3 months you will have:

1. Managed two consulting engagements with developer customers, working closely with SWL’s partner who was leading these engagements.  You attended the client workshops to learn more about AE and helped compile SWL’s deliverables.
2. Partnered with the Director of Sustainability to craft scopes and proposals for four new developer prospects.  You helped decide whether SWL would bring on consulting partners or lead this work directly.  You will manage these engagements and SWL’s consultants. 
3. Become a thought partner with the AD-MEP and Thermal on engage a developer as a codeveloper for an AE product.

After 6 months you will have:

1. Managed the engagement with two real estate developers who accepted Sidewalk Labs’ proposal and in planning for a third.
2. Led proposals for three more development customers.
3. Begun working closely with a couple sustainability consultants to augment their typical low carbon master planning process with our ideas and products.
4. Created a suite of tools and checklists to help developers plan a low carbon development with less time and technology risk to mitigate. 
5. Presented the vision behind AE at one conference.

About You

• Hands-on Experience in Real Estate/AEC
  You have worked on teams designing or developing green buildings.  You have a familiarity with the planning, design, construction and commissioning process and timeline.  You have worked with developers and real estate owners and can empathize with their concerns, understand their parlance and appreciate their motivations.

• Ability to craft a proposal and manage across and up
  You can synthesize the needs of a developer and your own team and product to find the overlap and articulate an offering that offers both parties real value at the right price.  You have a sense of the time it takes to undertake certain tasks, and how to approach the work. You can direct a team of peers and senior managers to deliver what you need.

• Self starter, problem solver and doer
  You see obstacles as challenges to learn from and overcome.  You like to engage others in ideating solutions to your problems, but do not wait for instruction.  You proceed, listening and learning, toward your desired outcome.  You are a realist in your planning and an optimist in your execution, so that you deliver results where others might never graduate from a good idea.

• Passionate about cities and the values that bind us into communities
  You are concerned about equity and affordability, and you leave every project changed by your values and that of our team’s.  You appreciate commercial enterprise as a means of scaling solutions and are excited to grow a business that improves environmental outcomes. You are an entrepreneur with an environmental mission.

• Excellent work product
  You have attention to detail in your written work.  You are a concise and compelling speaker and writer, who can structure an argument, coalesce a strategy and lay out a plan of action.  You appreciate that there are a multitude of approaches to any deliverable, but you will ensure the final product meets Sidewalk Labs’ standards of professional excellence.

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.