Events Manager (Full Time)

Major League Hacking is hiring an Events Manager to help run and scale our growing slate of first-party technical events. This is a full-time, operations-focused role for someone who treats event planning like a system to be engineered, not just an experience to be designed. You'll work on a team as a peer with our current Event Producer, sharing ownership of the events portfolio, with a clear focus on the planning, logistics, and execution that keeps events on track from kickoff to wrap.

As MLH increases the volume of events we run ourselves, we need someone who can own the operational backbone of that growth: building and maintaining trackers, managing timelines across multiple events at once, coordinating vendors and stakeholders, and making sure nothing slips. This role is less about curating the on-site experience and more about making sure the trains run on time, every time, across an increasingly busy calendar.

The ideal candidate is the person colleagues describe as “organized to a fault.” You default to a spreadsheet or a tracker, you don't let details fall through the cracks, and you can hold a dozen moving parts in your head (and in a shared doc) without breaking a sweat.

Key Responsibilities

• Event Program Ownership: Co-own MLH's first-party events portfolio alongside our existing Events team, taking lead responsibility for the planning systems, timelines, and operational structure that keep a growing number of events on track.

• Planning & Tracking Systems: Build and maintain the trackers, project plans, checklists, and budgets for each event, and run the cadence (status updates, check-ins, milestone reviews) that keeps every event team aligned on where things stand.

• Vendor & Logistics Management: Source, negotiate, and manage relationships with venues, caterers, A/V vendors, and other contractors. Own contracts, scheduling, shipping, and on-site logistics, and the day-to-day vendor communication that keeps each event moving forward.

• Cross-Team Coordination: Act as the connective tissue between marketing, design, leadership, and on-site staff. Translate event requirements into clear timelines and deliverables for other teams, and keep everyone accountable to their part of the plan.

• Risk Management & Troubleshooting: Spot logistical risks before they become problems, build contingency plans, and serve as the calm, organized point person when something on-site or upstream needs to be solved quickly.

• Process & Scale: Build the repeatable workflows, templates, and playbooks that let MLH run more events without a proportional increase in chaos. Continuously refine how the team plans and tracks events as volume grows.

• Budget & Reporting: Track spend against budget across multiple concurrent events, flag variances early, and report clearly on status, risk, and outcomes to stakeholders.

• On-Site Execution: Oversee logistics on event day, including setup, vendor management, and run-of-show coordination, ensuring the operational plan holds up in the room.

• Experience: 3+ years in event operations, program management, or project management, ideally having managed multiple concurrent projects or events with real budget and vendor responsibility. This is not an entry-level role.

• Operational Excellence: A demonstrated track record of running tight, well-documented processes. You build the tracker before anyone asks for it, and you're the person a team trusts to keep a complex plan on schedule.

• Spreadsheet & Tools Fluency: Strong working proficiency with project management and event tools (e.g., Asana, Airtable, Notion, Smartsheet, Eventbrite/Luma) and advanced comfort in Google Workspace/Microsoft Office, especially spreadsheets.

• Vendor & Contract Management: Experience sourcing, negotiating, and managing vendor and venue contracts, with an eye for cost, risk, and reliability.

• Communication: Clear, proactive, and direct communicator who keeps stakeholders informed without being asked, and who can hold vendors and internal teams accountable to deadlines.

• Judgment & Ownership: Comfortable making decisions independently, prioritizing across competing demands, and owning outcomes rather than waiting for direction.

• Pace: Thrives with several events in motion at once, shifting priorities, and a calendar that gets busier, not calmer, as the team scales.

• Travel: Able to travel for site visits and on-site event execution as needed.

This role is hybrid, and we expect this person to be based within commuting distance of MLH's office hub in NYC. Given that this role sits on our events team, we have a strong preference for candidates based near New York. We also expect that this person will need to travel regularly to visit our in-person events to see them firsthand.

This is not a five-days-a-week-in-office role, and day-to-day work is flexible. In practice, the events team gets together in person roughly once every two weeks for planning, collaboration, and the kind of fast problem-solving that's easier shoulder-to-shoulder than over Slack. Being within a reasonable commuting distance of our office and reliably able to join in-person sessions is an important part of how this role works.