About Arena Hall
Arena Hall is a private members club opening in Austin in early 2027 — a space built for founders, operators, and high-caliber thinkers who show up not just to discuss the future but to build it together. A twenty-two-thousand-square-foot restored church on a fifty-thousand-square-foot campus, full member dining and bar service, an ambitious events programme, and a membership of people doing serious work in the world.
We are not a venue that occasionally hosts things. The programme is the product. In a single recent month the club ran well over a hundred events, from fourteen-seat working lunches to evenings of two hundred, and the reason members join, renew and bring their friends is what happens in those rooms and what they carry out of them afterwards.
The Role
Read this part carefully, because it is the thing most candidates will get wrong about this job. This is not a marketing role. It is a product role. What you make is part of what a member pays for.
Almost everything interesting that happens here happens once and then evaporates. A congressman and a data centre developer argue for ninety minutes and arrive somewhere neither expected. A philosopher holds thirty people at a member's house until eleven at night. A Navy pilot briefs a closed room on things the Pentagon will not explain. Some of that gets written down beautifully. Most of it does not get written down at all, and a member who was not in the room has no way to reach it.
You would close that gap, and then build the operation that keeps it closed. The recap that goes back to the room. The pre-read that means nobody arrives cold. The page for the event. The magazine that collects a season into something a member keeps on a shelf. The forty-foot editorial wall in the building. Short films that run before a talk. The first printed object that lands on a member's desk and stays there.
And underneath all of it, the archive: six hundred and sixty-six events have thrown off transcripts, photographs, video, room lists and quotes, and today they sit in whatever folder the nearest person chose. Making that a findable, attributable, reusable body of work is part of running the operation, not a separate job bolted onto it.
The founder writes most of this today, from a terminal, usually after midnight. That is the constraint we are hiring to remove. You will have real tooling and a founding AI engineer alongside you, and you will be expected to use both rather than asking for a bigger team.
How the Job Will Be Judged
We would rather tell you the metrics now than have you discover them in month four. Two things, both about members rather than about audiences:
- Connectedness. How many members are actually in the life of the club. Today, 138 of 279 members said yes to at least one thing in the last ninety days. That is 49 per cent, we can compute it any morning, and moving it is the job.
- Renewal. The downstream consequence. A member who reads what we send, comes to things, and finds people they needed to meet does not leave.
Reach, impressions, followers and press hits are not on this list. They belong to other people and other roles, and we will not judge you by them.
What You Will Own
The Writing
- Recaps written from the transcript, to a standard the room will respect: the finding leads, even when it is the uncomfortable one; quotes run verbatim and unattributed; nothing ships that the people present would not recognise as true
- Longer work when an event earns it — case studies, briefing documents, field reports
- Invitations and pre-reads, written per-person where the occasion warrants it
- The member letter, on a dependable cadence
- The house style guide, which does not currently exist, so the voice survives any one person
The Editorial Operation
- A real calendar: what is being made, by whom, and when it ships — none of which exists today
- The archive, and the discipline that keeps it usable: transcripts, photography, video, quotes, room lists, rights and consent
- What is on the record, what is off it, and what never gets written down at all. A great deal of what is said here is off the record and that judgment currently lives in one person's memory
- Commissioning and directing photographers, designers and film-makers, and holding them to a standard
- Over time, a small team. We want someone we can build a department around, not only someone who files beautifully
The Objects
- A printed magazine: the case for it, the format, the rhythm, and the first issue
- The forty-foot editorial wall — what it says, how often it changes, and what it is for
- The screens through the house: the daily room, who is here, what is on tonight
- Short film and AI-assisted pre-roll that runs before talks and on the walls
- Print, properly: the programme, the annual, the menu card, the invitation that arrives by post
Event Communications & Custom RSVPs
- The full arc for every event: brief, invitation, pre-read, event page, confirmation, recap, follow-up, and the hook into the next one
- Designing how an invitation behaves, not only how it reads: access tiers, waitlists, guest permissions, what each member is allowed to see. We built our own RSVP layer rather than renting one, and almost none of it has been designed yet
What This Role Does Not Own
Stated plainly so the boundary is clear from the first conversation. Brand, press and everything that reaches people before they are members sits with our outside partners at JDI — positioning, messaging, visual identity, media relations, and the marketing that recruits members. So does the design and launch of anything we are doing for the first time.
You inherit those things once they are running and you operate them with fidelity. Where an outside audience is involved, you are at the table but you are not holding the pen.
What We Are Looking For
Experience
- A proven editorial career: five or more years writing and editing to a standard, with work you can show us
- Plus editorial operations. This is the part that narrows the field. Many excellent writers and editors are individual contributors by temperament — they take an assignment and crush it. We need someone who still has those chops entirely, and who is also good at strategy, at managing people, at creating and killing process, and at working without being handed a brief
- A portfolio we can read and look at. It matters more than any line on your CV
- Evidence you can carry one idea across formats: the same story as a page, a film, a printed object and a wall
- Experience around live events, programming or a membership, where the audience is finite, known, and will notice
- Real fluency with AI tooling in your own practice — writing, image, video, or all three
- Editorial judgment about images as well as words
- Print and magazine production experience strongly preferred
Character — Essential
- A genuinely good writer, in the plain sense: clear, specific, unhurried, allergic to filler
- Comfortable writing for a room of accomplished people without flattering them
- Fast and finishing. This programme ships weekly; elegance that arrives late is worth nothing here
- Discreet. You will sit close to sensitive material about members and need judgment about what never gets recorded
- Self-directing. Nobody will hand you a content calendar, because building it is the job
- Warm. This is a hospitality company, and the work has to sound like a house rather than a brand
What Does Not Fit This Role
- A communications or PR person. This is an editorial job, and the two are not interchangeable — if the title you have been looking for is Director of Communications, this is not that role
- A pure individual contributor who wants assignments handed to them. There will be nobody to hand them out
- Someone whose experience is social metrics and campaign dashboards rather than making things people read and keep
- Someone who needs a brand book, an agency and a quarterly plan before they can start
- Someone from large-company marketing who has always had a team beneath them. This is a founding seat and you will be making the work yourself for a long while
- Someone who writes in marketing language — elevated, curated, bespoke, unparalleled — and cannot hear that it is empty
- Someone who treats AI as either a threat or a magic trick rather than a tool they already use daily
- Someone who would find it beneath them to proofread an invitation at nine at night before a lunch the next day
Timing & the Build
Arena Hall began a major structural refurbishment in July 2026, transforming the existing space into the environment described above, with a target opening of February 2027. The programme is already running at full pace in our interim space, which means this role has real work from the first week and does not wait for the building.
Whoever takes this seat will decide what the wall says on opening night, will have shipped the first printed object, and will have built the archive the club is remembered by.