Hub Site Development Lead

Why this role is written up first

Every other role at Robot Mercantile waits on a vehicle. This one does not. A Robotaxi network is only as real as the ground it stands on, and the ground has to be found, priced, powered, permitted, and signed before the first vehicle can be parked on it. Our Careers page says hub site development is the first family we expect to hire into, if and when we hire, for exactly that reason. This page is the fuller description, written now so the person who would do the work can find us before there is a posting.

This page describes a role we expect to create. It is not an open position and not an offer of employment.

What this role would be

You would own the site pipeline for the Carolinas: the list of candidate properties in each metro, what each one would cost to make into a hub, who owns it, what the utility says about power, and where each one stands on the way to a signed agreement. You would walk the sites, run the conversations with property owners and municipalities, and bring the founder a short list with the numbers attached. When a site is ready to become a hub, you would hand it to depot operations with everything they need to open it.

What you would do

• Build and keep the candidate-site list for Charlotte, Raleigh, and Wilmington: industrial parcels, distribution yards, closed dealerships, underused parking decks, and large surface lots near activity centers, each with owner, size, power situation, and a first estimate of what it would take to make the site launch-ready.
• Walk the sites. Every candidate gets a site visit, photographs, a sketch of how vehicles would move through it, and a written record that follows the same template every time.
• Work the power question early: meet the utility, understand interconnect timelines and capacity at each candidate, and find sites where a landowner or a charging operator has already started that clock.
• Run the relationships: property owners, charging operators, landlords, hotel and hospital and shopping-center managers for micro-hubs, venue operators for event hubs, and the municipal staff whose permits and zoning decisions a hub depends on.
• Structure the deal for each site with the founder and, later, the head of finance: a lease, a revenue share with a host, a partner-owned site we operate, or a build-to-suit, choosing the structure the site calls for rather than forcing one model onto every property.
• Keep the pipeline in the company's CRM, so the status of every site is visible to the people who depend on it and the numbers in an investor update are the numbers in the pipeline.
• Prepare each site for opening: the handoff to depot operations, the punch list for charging and electrical, and the record a rider, a partner, or an insurer could later be shown.

Who you would be

• You have five or more years in commercial real estate, electric-vehicle charging development, fleet or logistics site selection, or public works, in a role where you found and closed sites rather than managed ones already open.
• You know at least one of our metros well enough to name candidate properties from memory and the people who control them.
• You have negotiated with utilities and municipalities before and you know how long each step actually takes, which is the number that decides whether a site is real.
• You can build a financial picture of a site on one page and defend every line of it.
• You are comfortable working for a company that has no vehicles yet and says so, and you can describe our intent to a property owner without promising a date we do not have.
• You document as a habit: a site you walked and did not write up is a site nobody else can use.

How the work would be measured

Candidate sites identified and walked per metro; sites with a written power answer from the utility; sites under a signed agreement; the time from first contact to signature; and the cost per bay of making a site launch-ready against the estimate you gave for it. None of these numbers exist yet, because no site has been walked under this role. The targets belong on the posting, not on this page, and we intend to publish them with it.

What the posting would add that this page cannot

• A pay range. We intend to list one on every open role.
• The office, the metros in scope, travel expectations, the start date, and the reporting line (the founder).
• Background-check requirements consistent with a role that signs for property, stated in the posting.
• Benefits, and the training and certifications we would fund for the role.

Not open yet

There is no hub, no fleet, and no start date. Joining the talent network under Hub site development is how to be on the list when there is, and it creates no obligation on either side. Join the talent network under Hub site development.