Senior Hub Developer

We're looking for a developer to grow Ember's network of charging hubs. You'll find the sites, take them through legals and planning, manage the build and energise them. How you work and think matters more to us than which industry you've worked in. You think clearly, can run several projects at once and are as at home on a site as behind a desk.

About Ember

We're building the future of public transport — convenient, affordable, connected and zero-emission. Our goal is to make it easier and more enjoyable to get from A to B with Ember than it is with your own car.

Ember is a tech company, not a traditional bus operator. We've built a platform that coordinates our entire operation — everything from monitoring vehicles and controlling chargers to selling tickets and calculating ETAs. This allows us to use electric buses more intensively than anyone else in the world, leading to a massive reduction in emissions. It also helps us provide a much better passenger experience, with innovative features like demand-responsive stops.

We’re still tiny, with a handful of routes and ~100 buses. The challenge is to scale this 50x whilst staying lean, increasing efficiency and delivering an even better product experience. We’ve recently raised a Series A from some of Europe’s leading climate VCs and are looking for mission-driven individuals who want to get on board and help take us to the next level.

The role

Charging hubs are Ember's key growth enabler. They give us the ultra-fast charge points we need to run our network, and they act as a base for our fleet — parking, washing, driver lounges and more. We have hubs across Scotland today, with additional sites across the UK under construction or in the pipeline.

You'll join a small team of four, taking end-to-end responsibility for your own sites and helping out on others. We're typically running a handful of projects at any one time.

Step one is finding a site. You’ll need to think about where we need charging capacity to support future routes, scout industrial estates and brownfield plots and reach out to commercial agents, local authorities and landlords. Some great sites are advertised but many are not, so landing one usually means being patient and creative.

Once you've got a site, we move on to lease negotiations, design, the planning application and the power connection. You'll work with network operators to land the grid connection, and with our suppliers to procure, install and commission the charging equipment. Solicitors, architects and engineers are there to help, but the project is yours to drive — you set the direction, you ask the difficult questions and you make the trade-offs.

It’s important to be hands-on. We don't go to tender and leave the rest to an outsourced project manager — we want you on site, asking why a kerb is in the wrong place. Even after a site is live, our involvement doesn't stop. The team keeps refining and improving every site, and you'll be part of that work across the network, not just on the sites you've built yourself.

Diversity and equality

At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave.

Read more about our approach in our Equal Opportunities Policy.

What's on offer

You'll receive a salary of £55,000–£75,000 per annum, depending on your experience and skills, plus share options. You'll be expected to work from our lovely office in central Edinburgh most days — we value in-person communication — but there's flexibility around the odd day from home, with an expectation that you'll spend some time travelling to different sites.

How do I apply?

Send your CV and a short note on why this interests you.

Applications close Friday 2 October at 5pm.

Who we're looking for

You should have a desire to get involved in the growth of a quickly scaling business, with a real opportunity to make your mark. How you work and think matters more to us than specific industry experience. The following should sound a lot like you:

• Curious and quick to learn. You're comfortable in unfamiliar territory — new technical specs, new legal terms, new planning processes — and you treat each one as an opportunity to learn. You don't expect to know everything on day one.

• Engineering mindset. You're the sort of person who'll happily watch YouTube videos explaining concrete reinforcement, three-phase distribution or substation transformers. You'll be excited to dive into the same level of detail on our projects.

• A first-principles thinker. You take problems back to fundamentals rather than reaching for jargon or the way things are usually done. When you work with experts — solicitors, architects, engineers — you treat them as people you can learn from, not people you can outsource your thinking to.

• Commercially astute. You can tell when something is worth fighting for and when it's better to redesign around a constraint, whether that's a lease, a planning condition or a contractor's quote.

• Highly organised. Managing a pipeline of projects is complex, with many timelines, people to chase, details to look into and things that can (and will) go wrong. We want you at Inbox Zero, not in inbox hell.

• Comfortable using AI. At a minimum you use it as part of how you work — to learn faster, draft documents and get to the bottom of unfamiliar topics. But maybe you’ll go further and build software to help the team work faster and more precisely.

• Hands-on. Hubs are built in the real world, not behind a screen. You'll meet landlords, talk to electricians and look at drains, but you'll also need to read contracts and chase agents who've gone quiet.

• A strong sense of what good looks like. Whatever the topic, problem or issue. You need to know how to hold yourself and others to a high standard.