Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company that tackles cities' greatest challenges. We create products and solutions, invest in new companies, and help developers build more sustainable, innovative, and equitable places around the world. Our ambitious vision requires us to push ourselves beyond conventional thinking, and we work hard in pursuit of our mission. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

Our urban innovations include Delve (a generative design product that empowers real estate teams to design better, faster, with less risk), Mesa (an easy-install kit for commercial buildings that cuts energy costs, improves tenant comfort, and simplifies building operations), Pebble (a low-cost vehicle sensor to help manage parking and curb space), and Affordable Electrification (a new way to manage home energy use to meet a customer’s monthly budget). We're also developing an offsite construction company that can deliver high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working.

With the potential to radically improve quality of life in cities for all, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

As a principal 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 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.

For more information about Delve, please check out this video.

We encourage engineers with at least five 8 years of experience to apply.

Note: We are currently working remotely, and we expect to eventually re-open our offices when it is safe to return, in 2022. After re-opening, candidates will be expected to come into the New York office in a hybrid capacity.

What you have to achieve:

• Within your first month, you build a deep understanding of Sidewalk Labs’ current initiatives and technology infrastructure (Python 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.
• 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 8+ 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.
• 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.

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

We are very excited to hear from you.

Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.