Community Manager
Darkroom · New York City
About Darkroom
Darkroom is the leading next-generation growth marketing firm engineering the brands of tomorrow. Founded in 2017, we set out to redefine what a modern agency could be, by replacing the inertia of legacy advertising behemoths with a model built for speed, intelligence, and measurable impact.
At our core, Darkroom is a human services company powered by Shadow, a universal AI commerce layer that integrates executive-level strategy with proprietary agentic technology. This fusion enables our teams to deliver outsized returns by enhancing creative output, operational efficiency, and revenue generation across every stage of the customer journey.
Our track record speaks for itself: billions in attributable revenue driven across e-commerce marketplaces, media networks, DTC ecosystems, and social commerce platforms. Every engagement feeds into our proprietary data infrastructure, enabling a continuous feedback loop that accelerates growth, improves margins, and compounds results across our client portfolio.
What began as a boutique design studio has evolved into one of the fastest-growing private companies in America (Inc. 5000) and among the most effective performance media agencies of the 2020s (Varos). Our founders were recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 for advancing the intersection of technology, marketing, and advertising, cementing Darkroom's role as a defining player in the future of media innovation.
About the Role
Darkroom owns the strategy for the brands we work with, and more than ever that success rides on building a successful online community. As Community Manager, you own that success end to end, from the first comment on a brand's Instagram to the fostering of an inner circle of top creators.
Think of it as one system with three layers:
The front door. The brand's owned social accounts (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, and YouTube), where most people first talk to the brand.
The community. Tiered, and where the relationships are built. A small inner circle of top creators gets money, early access, and a direct line to the brand. A larger ambassador tier gets access, perks, and first look at launches. Program tiers, like campus leaders or customer champions, run their own threads. The open community is where everyone else joins.
The output. Your work will inform the what the client and community produces outside itself: posts, content, referrals, and signups or sales.
You own the conversation at every layer, and you decide how people move from one to the next: how they get in, what each tier gets, what happens every week, and how activity turns into output. The social team owns content and publishing. You own the replies, the DMs, the moderation, the relationships, and the conversation around what they post.
This is a consumer role. The people in these communities are students, parents, professionals, and fans, and a community run like a support forum or a developer channel will not work here.
You report to a Director and work alongside the creator team, social team, paid media, and each client's product and brand teams. This role is based in New York, working US hours, with travel for events.
What You'll Do
Build new communities
Choose the platform for each community (usually Discord, sometimes Slack, WhatsApp, Geneva, Circle, or a subreddit) and stand it up: channel architecture, roles and permissions, bots, onboarding, tier assignment, and moderation rules.
Set the entry rules and the offer for each tier with the creator leads and the client, such as free product for creators over a follower threshold, student access, or referral perks.
Build a proof channel before launch, where members show what the product did for them. It is the flex wall, and the best posts get reposted by the brand.
Set up the path from the brand's social accounts into the community, so a follower who wants in knows how to join and lands in the right tier.
Run it every week
Welcome new members, assign tiers, and post open briefs in #briefs with a clear view of who claimed what and when it is due.
Run the 1-in-20 triage: find the post that popped, work out why, and brief the rest of the roster on it the same week.
Repost the top receipts and hand the best ones to the social and paid teams.
Give members a real line to the brand. Route product questions, feedback, and bug reports to the client's team and bring the answers back.
Monthly: an AMA with someone from the brand, program leaderboards, and a roster health check (who is posting, who has gone quiet, and what you do about it).
Be the community voice on the brand's social accounts
Manage the conversation on each brand's owned accounts every day: reply to comments, mentions, and DMs in the brand's voice, and moderate spam, abuse, and off-topic threads.
Do it proactively as well as reactively. Start conversations, answer fan and creator posts in public, and show up where the brand is being talked about, including subreddits and threads the brand has not posted in.
Source user-generated content from tags, mentions, and community posts, get usage permission, and hand it to the social and paid teams with a note on why it works.
Spot your best people early. Invite engaged followers into the community, and move the strongest members up the tiers.
Listen for sentiment, recurring questions, and early complaints, and report them to the client and the social team.
Keep a voice guide, a response library, and an escalation path for each brand, so replies stay consistent as the Creator Associates take on more of the volume. When something goes wrong in public, like a product issue at launch or a creator complaining, you handle it and know what to escalate.
Launches and drops
Every launch lands in the community first. You run the sequence: inner circle, then ambassadors and program tiers, then everyone else, in step with the social team.
Get real conversation going in the first two hours, in the community and in the comments on the brand's launch posts. No copy-paste.
In person
Co-run creator events with the creator leads, such as pre-launch dinners, launch parties, and campus or pop-up activations. Recruit into the community on the spot, and make sure every event produces content.
Measure it
Report on each brand as one growth channel, from social to community to output: response rate and sentiment on owned accounts, members by tier, weekly active share, proof posts per week, UGC sourced, the share of ambassadors posting, and signups or sales attributed through community links and codes.
Write the SOPs as you go, so each program scales, transfers, and makes the next build faster.
What Good Looks Like at 90 Days
At least one community is live with tiers, onboarding, and moderation, ahead of a client launch.
The client's creator roster is in it, and the proof channel has a steady flow of posts from real use.
The client's owned social accounts have a voice guide, a response library, and an escalation path, and followers have a clear way into the community.
The weekly cadence and routine replies run through the Creator Associates. You are not the one moderating.
Community activity, from social comments to proof posts, is tied to signups or sales in a view the client can read.
There is a written playbook the next community can start from.
What We're Looking For
You have built and run an online community for a consumer product, ideally one that grew fast. This is the most important thing on this list. Running a Discord at thousands of members is a strong signal. Moderating someone else's community is not the same thing.
You have also managed community on a brand's social accounts: replying, moderating, sourcing UGC, and handling issues in public across several of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, and YouTube.
You know what makes people post. You can say why one post gets reshared and another does not, and turn that into a brief other people can use.
Fluent in creator culture and in how each platform behaves, from a good reply on TikTok versus LinkedIn to how Reddit treats brands. Comfortable with everyone from a college sophomore to a creator with a million followers.
Technical enough to own the setup yourself: roles, permissions, bots, onboarding flows, and automations, plus social management and listening tools.
You write like a person. You can hold one voice across a server, DMs, comment sections, and a room, and adapt it to each brand.
Organized for volume: hundreds of people joining in a launch week, more than one community and more than one brand's accounts at a time, nothing dropped.
Calm when something goes wrong, like a product issue at launch or a creator complaining in public. You handle it and know what to escalate.
Comfortable with clients. You can explain what the community is doing for their business and push back when a request would hurt it.
AI-native. Our team works alongside AI for moderation, triage, analytics, and drafting, and you should be excited to build workflows with it.
Available for evenings and launch weekends when the community is most active, and able to travel.
Bonus Points
You launched a community or ambassador program for a consumer app, AI product, or DTC brand.
You ran a campus ambassador or student program.
You have built an audience of your own, on any platform.
You have run a brand's owned social community at an agency or in-house, including through a launch.
Event production experience.
Agency experience, or experience working directly with a client's product team.
Familiarity with Notion, our operating layer.
Working at Darkroom
Darkroom is not a typical agency. We are looking for A players who want to build something great. We move fast, think deeply, and expect every team member to bring insight and rigor to everything they touch. We hold a high bar for performance, creativity, and ownership — but we also support each other relentlessly. No egos, no red tape — just world-class talent building something remarkable.
We believe in autonomy with accountability, truth over comfort, and outcomes over optics.
Unlimited PTO + Local holidays: Rebooting is part of the work. Take the time you need to stay sharp.
Remote-First Culture: Many roles are fully remote. Employees based in or near our New York or Lisbon HQs are expected to work hybrid with weekly in-office time.
Parental Leave: Flexible parental leave to support new parents during this important transition.
Growth: Our interdisciplinary model gives every Darkroomer exposure far beyond their core role. Grow your skills, expand your influence, and stay at the forefront of the industry.
Equal Opportunity Statement:
Darkroom is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.