Founder's Associate

Midnight Mansion creates immersive, in-person experiences, bringing together design, engineering, fabrication, and creative technology. We’re looking for a Founder’s Associate to work closely with our CEO across technical projects, business operations, procurement, research, proposals, and whatever problems need to be figured out and moved forward.

This is a full-time, in-person role and requires the ability to commute to our working locations in Needham, MA and Somerville, MA as needed.

The core of this high-trust, high-agency role is multiplying what the CEO can get done by taking ownership of important work and its day-to-day details. You’ll be handed problems that may be incomplete, loosely defined, technical, operational, or entirely new. Your job is to quickly understand what we’re trying to accomplish, figure out what information is missing, identify the paths forward, and drive toward a useful result through hands-on execution and follow-through.

Some days you might research and source an unfamiliar piece of hardware, compare vendors, or work with our technical team to understand the tradeoffs between different approaches. Other days you might help develop a proposal, investigate a business question, improve an internal process, or take a half-formed idea and turn it into something the company can act on.

You will not always be given complete information or a step-by-step assignment. We’re looking for someone who is comfortable working through ambiguity, knows how to find answers, and can make a recommendation, act within agreed authority, and keep work moving.

As you build context and trust, you’ll grow into ownership of larger projects or parts of the business.

• Fast and detail-oriented. You absorb information quickly, stay accurate, and catch things others miss.
• Resourceful and independent. You can take an unclear problem, figure out what matters, and make meaningful progress without needing every step defined.
• Strong practical judgment. You can lay out the options, understand the tradeoffs, and recommend a path forward.
• Technically curious. You don’t need to be an engineer, but you’re willing to learn how unfamiliar systems work, read relevant documentation, and know when to involve a specialist.
• Business-minded. You consider cost, time, risk, quality, and practicality alongside the ideal solution.
• Clear, organized, and trustworthy. You turn messy information into concise actions, keep people informed, and handle sensitive information with discretion.

Success in this role means increasingly being able to take an incomplete problem off someone else’s plate and return with it understood, organized, and meaningfully closer to solved.

• Take loosely defined problems from research and recommendations through hands-on execution and completed work.
• Research technical, operational, and business questions and get up to speed quickly on unfamiliar subjects.
• Source and evaluate products, components, vendors, and services based on cost, capability, lead time, and fit.
• Work across engineering, design, fabrication, projects, and outside vendors to gather information and move work forward.
• Support proposals, scopes, estimates, procurement, and other company priorities requiring research and attention to detail.
• Identify missing information, dependencies, contradictions, and risks; handle the follow-ups and routine details needed to close loops.
• Take ownership of increasingly complex problems and initiatives, improving recurring processes and reducing routine decisions that need the CEO.

• Experience in a role involving some combination of operations, technical production, procurement, research, project delivery, fabrication, consulting, or startup…