Careers

Autonomous vehicle technicians. The people who keep the fleet launch-ready. Entry-level work is inspections, tire service, light mechanical repair, and documentation that follows the same standard on every shift. Senior work is hardware removal and replacement on sensors and compute units, network triage, and the technical authority to say a vehicle is ready for riders. High-voltage safety, lockout and tagout, and shift work including nights and weekends are part of the job from day one.

Depot and hub operations. Shift leads and site managers who run a hub around the clock: charging schedules, cleaning cycles, vehicle staging, lost-and-found, incident response, and the daily numbers partners see. Fleet, rideshare, airport, or logistics operations experience translates directly.

Hub site development. The people who find and secure the ground: industrial and parking property, utility interconnects, permits, landlord and municipal relationships. Commercial real estate, EV charging development, or public-works backgrounds fit here. This is the first family we expect to hire into, if and when we hire, because it is the work that has to happen before the vehicles arrive.

Charging and electrical. Licensed electricians and charging technicians who install, commission, and maintain high-speed and inductive charging, manage power at a site, and work with the utility.

Rider support. The voice a rider hears when they tap for help: calm, clear, and available across the hours the fleet runs. Contact-center, hospitality, or dispatch experience fits.

Cleaning and detailing crews. Interior turnarounds many times a day, scheduled full details, and exterior washes that keep cameras clear. Reliability and pride in the work matter more than prior experience.

Event and partner operations. Coordinators who plan and staff pickup points at games, concerts, and conferences, and who manage the relationship with venues and property partners.

Root cause review. Trigger: any vehicle returned to a bay for the same fault within thirty days, any rider complaint that repeats on the same vehicle or route, any charging session that fails twice at the same position, any near miss. Owner: the shift lead, with the technician who found it. Method: the team asks why, in writing, until the answer is a cause we can change, and it must land on one of four things: a part, a procedure, a supplier, or a training gap. Output: a change to the standard within a week, logged against the vehicle and the hub, and shared to every other hub the same day. A review that ends in "operator error" is not finished.

Weekly improvement review. Trigger: the calendar. Every hub, every week, twenty minutes on the floor before the busiest shift. Owner: the site manager, but anyone may bring an item, and cleaning crews bring as many as technicians. Method: one waste, delay, or near miss per person, described with a number where one exists; the group picks the changes worth trying, each assigned to one bay or one shift for one week with a measure agreed in advance. Output: after the week, the change is adopted at every hub, kept for another trial, or dropped, and the decision is recorded with its number. Nothing is adopted on a feeling.

Right part, right place, right time. Trigger: the fleet's measured consumption, not a guess. Owner: the hub's parts lead. Method: tires, filters, sensor covers, cleaning supplies, and charging consumables are stocked to the fleet's recorded use over the trailing month plus a stated safety margin, and every repair is kitted before the vehicle enters the bay, so a bay is never blocked by a missing part or crowded by a surplus one. Vehicles are handled the same way: positioned at a hub, a venue, or a curb when demand is about to arrive, using the rider demand we measure by hour and by event, rather than sitting idle in a lot or circling for a ride. Output: bay time spent waiting for parts, and vehicle hours spent empty, both tracked and both driven down.

Design out the mistake. Trigger: any step where a wrong action is possible and the consequence is a rider or a technician at risk. Owner: whoever designs the step, reviewed by the safety lead. Method: the wrong action is made impossible or immediately visible rather than trained against. At a Robot Mercantile hub that means a high-voltage bay that cannot be entered until lockout and tagout is complete; a software load that will not start until the inspection record is signed; torque tools that record the value they applied and refuse to release a wheel outside the range; a charging position, plug-in or inductive, that confirms a correctly seated vehicle before power flows; and a departure gate that will not release a vehicle whose launch-ready record is incomplete. Output: every mistake we prevent by design is a defect a rider never meets and a step a new hire cannot get wrong.

Safety before anything else. The first days at a hub are safety: high-voltage awareness and lockout and tagout for anyone who works near a vehicle, hazardous-material handling for anyone who handles fluids or batteries, and site rules for moving among vehicles that move themselves. No one is cleared onto the floor until they have demonstrated these, not merely attended them.

A skills ladder, not a title ladder. Every role family has a written ladder of tasks, from the first inspection a new technician may perform alone to the sensor and compute work only a senior technician signs off. A person moves up the ladder by demonstrating the task on the floor to someone already qualified, and the demonstration is recorded. Pay follows the ladder.

Six Sigma for everyone. We intend for every hub employee to complete Yellow Belt training early in their employment, so the language of defects, root causes, and standard work is shared across the floor, and for shift leads and site managers to train to Green Belt. The founder holds a Green Belt.

Certifications we expect to require or fund. Occupational safety training appropriate to the role, electric-vehicle high-voltage safety certification for technicians, electrical licensing for charging and electrical staff, and manufacturer training on the vehicles we operate as it becomes available to independent operators. Where a certification is required for the job, we intend to fund it.

Rider support and accessibility. Support staff train on calm, plain communication under pressure, on serving riders with mobility devices and service animals, and on the exact steps for a rider who needs a vehicle to pull over. Event and partner staff drill pickup-point operations before the first event, not during it.

Standard work is the curriculum. Training material is the same document the floor works from. When a procedure changes, the training changes the same day, and everyone qualified on the old procedure re-qualifies on the new one.

Where the technicians come from. The pipeline already exists in our first metro. Tesla START, as Tesla describes it, is an intensive training program that partners with colleges to integrate multi-week capstones into automotive, collision, and manufacturing curriculums, combining in-class theory, hands-on labs, and self-paced learning, and moving selected students into full-time employment at Tesla. Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte hosts it at its Merancas campus in Huntersville, a short drive from our office in Mooresville, as a twelve-week program with more than five hundred hours of hands-on electric-vehicle training. Not every graduate wants to relocate to a Tesla service center, and a fleet hub in the Carolinas needs exactly the automotive and collision skills that program teaches. We intend to recruit from it and from the automotive and electric-vehicle programs at community colleges in each of our metros, to sponsor students where we can, and to make a Robot Mercantile hub the place a graduate wants to start. Sources: Tesla START, Central Piedmont Community College Foundation, WBTV.

Training with an AI coach, built from our best technicians. Most training material describes the right answer. Ours will describe how a good technician gets there. We intend to capture, from the most capable technicians we hire and from the senior advisors on our board, the way they actually work a problem: what they check first on a vehicle that came back, what they rule out and in what order, when they stop and escalate, and how they document what they found. Those patterns, decisions, and reasoning become the training corpus, not a manual of facts. We intend to deploy that corpus through Grok, xAI's assistant, as a coach on the hub floor: it walks a new technician through an inspection in the order a senior one would, asks the root-cause questions before the technician reaches for a second quick fix, retrieves the exact standard work for the task in front of them, and drills them toward qualification on the skills ladder. It never signs a vehicle back into service. A qualified person does that, every time, and the coach's own suggestions are reviewed by the people whose reasoning it learned from. Every correction a technician makes to the coach goes back into the corpus, so the training improves the way the hub improves: in small measured steps. Grok is a trademark of xAI; Robot Mercantile has no relationship with xAI beyond intending to use its product.

Colleges and training partners. We intend to partner with the community colleges in each of our metros the way an employer can before it has a single vehicle: a seat on the automotive program's advisory committee so the curriculum reflects what a Robotaxi hub needs, a named scholarship for students in electric-vehicle coursework, guest instruction and, once hubs exist, site visits. We intend to offer graduates of partner automotive programs an interview at a Robot Mercantile hub. When the first hub has a start date, we intend to sponsor registered apprenticeships for technician and charging roles and to build hub-specific training with the college through North Carolina's customized training program. Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte is where we intend to start; Raleigh and Wilmington follow the same pattern. These are intentions until a college has agreed to them, and we will say so here until it has.

Training is measured. Who is qualified for what, when they qualified, and when they re-qualify are visible to the site manager every day. A hub with a gap in its qualifications is a hub with a gap in its launch-ready standard, and it is treated that way.

Employment eligibility. Robot Mercantile intends to enroll in E-Verify before making its first hire and to confirm employment eligibility for every new employee through it.

Equal opportunity. Robot Mercantile LLC is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any factor protected by applicable federal, state, or local law, including veteran status and disability status.

Reasonable accommodation. We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need an accommodation at any point in a conversation or interview with us, tell the person you are speaking with, or write to jj@robotmercantile.com.

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