LAZ Parking is preparing for one of the biggest hiring pushes in its history as a business once known mainly for garages and parking attendants moves deeper into the technology-driven mobility economy. The Hartford, Connecticut-based company says it expects to create more than 1,000 jobs and career opportunities across North America within the next year, with hiring connected to electric-vehicle charging, autonomous-vehicle support, transportation services, artificial intelligence and other operations. More than 100 additional positions are also planned for its Hartford headquarters. The expansion, part of a strategy the company calls “LAZ 3.0,” comes as LAZ simultaneously reshapes its leadership and builds on a network that now stretches across 44 U.S. states and eight Canadian provinces.
The Hiring Plan Reaches Far Beyond Parking
The most striking part of LAZ Parking’s expansion is not simply the number of positions involved, but the range of businesses expected to generate them. The company says growth will take place across parking management, transportation services, mobility hubs, EV charging infrastructure and autonomous-vehicle support. Technology and innovation, customer-experience operations, business intelligence, artificial intelligence and corporate and field leadership are also included. That creates a very different employment picture from the traditional image of a parking company built primarily around attendants, cashiers and facility managers.
LAZ expects more than 1,000 new jobs and career advancement opportunities during the next year, although its September 15 announcement does not provide a country-by-country allocation or specify how many positions will fall into each business line. It also does not disclose a total dollar value for the expansion. That distinction matters: the 1,000-plus figure is a forward-looking hiring target rather than a tally of positions already filled. Still, the breadth of the plan illustrates how parking operators increasingly sit at the intersection of real estate, transportation, energy infrastructure and digital services.
Hartford Is Getting a 100-Plus-Job Expansion
The growth plan has a particularly tangible component in Hartford, where LAZ was founded in 1981 and has maintained its headquarters for more than four decades. The company plans to expand that office so it can accommodate more than 100 additional employees. Those positions are expected to span technology, finance, human resources, operations, marketing, customer experience, data analytics and strategic growth. For a headquarters expansion, that is a broad mix of functions rather than a narrowly defined hiring program.
Hartford also remains symbolically important to LAZ as the company becomes increasingly continental in scale. A business that began as a local parking operation now manages millions of parking spaces in hundreds of cities, yet its leadership is deliberately keeping a significant share of corporate growth in its home city. For workers, that could mean that some of the jobs created by the mobility transition will look less like traditional transportation work and more like technology, analytics or corporate-services positions. A data analyst studying occupancy patterns and an operations manager overseeing a garage may increasingly be part of the same mobility organization.
EV Charging Has Become a Major Growth Track
EV charging is one of the clearest examples of how LAZ is trying to turn existing parking real estate into transportation infrastructure. In 2025, the company partnered with Epic Charging on a program aimed at electrifying 50,000 parking spaces with Level 2 charging over five years. LAZ later made a strategic investment in Epic, reinforcing a “Charge Where You Park” model covering properties such as hotels, airports, municipalities, surface lots and mixed-use developments. Autel Energy was selected as a preferred hardware provider for the program.
LAZ is pursuing faster public charging as well. Its collaboration with bp pulse calls for ultra-fast charging hubs at LAZ-managed properties in 20 cities over five years. The proposed sites use chargers rated at 250 kW or higher, are intended to operate around the clock and can pair charging with parking. The wider market helps explain the push. The International Energy Agency reported that more than 20 million electric cars were sold globally in 2025, representing roughly one in four new-car sales. In Canada, Transport Canada counted 39,220 public charging connectors by March 2026. Installing, monitoring and operating more chargers creates work extending from electrical infrastructure to software, payments and customer support.
Autonomous Vehicles Create a New Kind of Service Demand
Autonomous-vehicle support is another business line LAZ specifically identifies as an area for expansion, although the company has not provided a detailed breakdown of what those services will involve or identified specific autonomous-driving customers in its latest announcement. That limitation is important because it prevents the hiring announcement from being treated as evidence of a particular robotaxi partnership. What is clear is that LAZ sees its network of parking and transportation properties as potentially useful infrastructure as autonomous fleets become more common.
The logic is increasingly visible across the industry. Driverless fleets still need physical places to go when they are not carrying passengers. Vehicles require parking, charging or refuelling, inspection, cleaning and maintenance, while operators need strategically located facilities that minimize empty driving. Recent reporting on proposed robotaxi “fleet ports” has highlighted exactly those needs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation released a national automated-vehicle strategy in September 2026, and California continues to authorize numerous companies for various forms of autonomous testing or deployment. In that environment, an urban parking facility can potentially evolve from a place where privately owned cars sit idle into part of the operating infrastructure behind commercial vehicle fleets.
A Much Larger Footprint Is Supporting the Expansion
LAZ has already spent several years building the physical footprint needed to support a broader mobility business. One of its biggest moves came in July 2025, when it acquired a 60% majority interest in Indigo Park Canada. At the time, LAZ said the combined operation managed more than 5,300 locations, employed more than 20,000 people and covered more than two million parking spaces. By September 2026, the company reported managing more than 2.1 million spaces across approximately 5,700 locations in 639 cities, covering 44 U.S. states and eight Canadian provinces.
Other deals pushed LAZ beyond passenger-car parking. The company acquired a majority interest in FleetLogix, which provides managed labour and technology services to transportation, logistics and fleet operators. It also bought a majority interest in Freight Ninja, a truck, trailer and fleet-parking specialist. Freight Ninja was operating 50 leased or managed industrial outdoor-storage locations when that transaction was announced, covering more than 300 acres and roughly 10,000 parking spaces. Together, those deals show why LAZ increasingly describes itself as a mobility and transportation provider rather than simply a parking operator.
AI and Digital Parking Are Changing the Skill Mix
Technology is also changing what happens inside an ordinary parking facility. LAZ’s JustGo platform, for example, uses AI-powered license-plate-recognition cameras to identify vehicles entering and leaving participating locations. Once payment information is set up, the system is designed to let drivers enter and exit without stopping for paper tickets. Other LAZ technology products handle digital payments, e-commerce, business intelligence and remote customer support. Its centralized customer-care operation provides assistance around the clock.
Those systems help explain why artificial intelligence, business intelligence, technology and customer experience appear alongside parking and transportation in the new hiring plan. A modern mobility operation needs people who can work with data, software integrations, payment systems and remote monitoring while field employees keep physical facilities running. The two sides increasingly overlap. A malfunctioning charger, for example, may require on-site service, remote diagnostics, payment support and software monitoring before a driver ever sees the issue resolved. LAZ is effectively betting that its value will come from combining those digital functions with its large physical network rather than treating technology and parking as separate businesses.
Leadership Is Changing at the Same Time the Company Scales
The hiring announcement is part of a larger transition LAZ calls “LAZ 3.0.” Tony DiPaolo and John Svendblad have been named co-chief executive officers effective January 1, 2027. DiPaolo joined LAZ in 2005 and has served as president of the Midwest, while Svendblad joined in 2008 and has led the West Coast business. LAZ says the pair together bring more than four decades of leadership experience inside the organization. The company also plans to elevate 21 senior leaders as part of the transition.
Current chairman and CEO Alan Lazowski will become executive chairman while remaining chairman of the board. LAZ’s founding partners—Lazowski, Jeff Karp, Michael Harth and Mike Kuziak—will join CFO Nathan Owen on a newly created Diamond Advisory Council. The five have committed to remain active in the business through 2032 and beyond. Rather than separating its leadership change from its hiring push, LAZ is presenting both as pieces of the same growth strategy: expand the workforce, build new mobility businesses and shift day-to-day leadership without abruptly removing the executives who developed the company.
The 1,000-Job Figure Remains a Target to Watch
For now, the most important qualification around the announcement is that LAZ “expects” to create more than 1,000 jobs and career opportunities over the coming year. The company has identified the business areas in which it expects expansion but has not published a detailed schedule showing how many employees will be added each quarter, how many will be based in Canada versus the United States, or how many will work specifically on EV charging and autonomous-vehicle support. Those details will determine how large the mobility-focused component of the hiring program ultimately becomes.
Even with those unanswered questions, the direction of travel is clear. LAZ now operates at a scale where parking garages, surface lots, airport operations and fleet facilities can double as platforms for charging, digital payments, transportation services and potentially autonomous-fleet support. That makes the company’s expansion notable beyond the headline employment number. The same business that still needs attendants and facility managers is increasingly hiring around data, AI, charging systems and next-generation transportation. If LAZ meets its target, more than 1,000 additional opportunities will emerge from that increasingly blurred boundary between parking infrastructure and the wider mobility economy.
