Hybrid work. Innovation. Collaboration. This is what New York City-based Moody's Corp. (NYSE: MCO) was after as it brought to life its new office space at South End's RailYard.
The tech company moved into the 81,700-square-foot space yesterday.
Moody's opened its first technology office in the Queen City in 2019 at WeWork in Regions 615 in uptown, CBJ previously reported. Doug Ryker, Moody's managing director of global real estate and workplace strategy, said the plan was to give the company solid footing in Charlotte and eventually move into a permanent office space.
"We established ourselves here (in 2019) with the intention that as we grew our footprint, we would look for more of a formal presence in the area," he said. "The city is somewhere we wanted to grow."
And grow it has.
Moody's first local office had just 40 employees. The new space has room for 500 across four floors, with about 300 people already on board, Ryker said. The lease runs through 2030.
Ryker declined to provide the total project cost.
The space has an open-concept design with natural light, very few individual offices and a three-story "green wall." Ryker said it was designed to encourage collaboration and innovation. This, he said, is how he expects Moody's to model all of its new offices in the future as they move into hybrid work.
"It’s really the pivotal shift of how we go from a fully remote environment to a hybrid one," he said. "This space, and the energy I felt, is going to invite people to come in and work together as a team ... It’s all sort of this airy, planscaping, kind of a new edge to how we think we’re going to use offices going forward."
Ryker said the company has plans to fill more seats later this month. On May 25, Moody's is hosting a technology career fair at its RailYard office. Open roles include application development, UX, product, data, cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, cybersecurity, and ESG data and development.
