Craig Nevill-Manning

Headshot

Sidewalk Labs

Head of Engineering

Craig is Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs, leading the engineering team – which focuses on developing new urban technologies – and working with portfolio companies to develop their engineering teams and technology. Before joining Sidewalk Labs, he founded Google’s first remote engineering center, located in New York City. In his role as Engineering Director at Google, he oversaw the development of products including Google Local (now Maps) and Froogle (now Google Shopping), as well as features of web search such as Question Answering and Web Definitions.

As engineering director of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, he co-founded Google.org’s Flu Trends and Crisis Response projects, providing maps, imagery and a missing persons service after crises in Japan and elsewhere. Prior to joining Google in 2000, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University. He is the author of 44 peer-reviewed academic publications, and was awarded a Career Grant by the National Science Foundation for work combining information retrieval and computational biology. A native of New Zealand, he earned a BSc in Computer Science from Canterbury University and a PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University. Passionate about great coffee, he co-founded Happy Bones café in Little Italy with his wife Kirsten and partners from New Zealand.