Account Director

Job Description

Midnight Sunday tells stories for some of the world's most admired hotels and hospitality brands. We are a small, fiercely specialist team with global reach, and the standard we hold ourselves to is the same one our clients hold their properties to.

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We are looking for an Account Director in New York. Someone ready to elevate accounts, not simply manage them.

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Please read the requirements before you apply. You need all four of the following:

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At least five years of agency experience. Inside an agency, not agency or in-house. You have run multiple clients, scopes, deadlines, budgets, and teams at the same time, and you understand how an agency works without needing it explained to you.

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At least three years spent directly managing people inside an agency, gained after you had already run accounts at a senior level yourself. Direct reports, not mentorship. Setting expectations, reviewing performance, giving difficult feedback, developing careers, holding people to their commitments, and knowing when to escalate. Being the most senior person on an account is not people management.

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Experience leading remote or distributed teams. You can create structure, visibility, rhythm and accountability without sitting in the same room as anyone.

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Senior client leadership. You have owned relationships with marketing directors and CMOs, presented strategy, led difficult conversations and protected the relationship when something went wrong.

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If you meet three of these four, this is not the right role for you at this moment.

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THE OPPORTUNITY

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Midnight Sunday operates as a globally distributed team across multiple time zones. The Account Director owns the client-facing layer completely, as the consistent senior presence between executive leadership and day-to-day account management. The role sits within a close-knit leadership structure, working directly with the Founder, the President and COO, and the Chief Creative Officer.

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This is a role for someone who wants real ownership rather than a job description to fulfill. If you see inefficiency as an opportunity and have the discipline to replace it with something better, that instinct will be valued here.

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WHAT YOU WILL OWN

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The client relationships. Own the senior relationship across a portfolio of luxury hotel accounts as the primary point of trust and strategic counsel. Lead the weekly and monthly sessions with clients and the internal team, raising the quality of the conversation and the ambition of the work each time. Anticipate what clients need before they ask and arrive with ideas rather than waiting for direction. Clients should experience Midnight Sunday as organized, strategic, responsive and senior, and that will largely be down to you.

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A portfolio you run yourself. This is not a purely supervisory position. Alongside leading the account management team, you will be the day-to-day senior contact on several of our key New York accounts. In the calls, on the emails, in the room. We are lean and our clients expect senior people to be present rather than represented, so you need to be comfortable running accounts yourself at the same time as holding the standard across accounts you do not run.

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The account management team. You are the primary point of escalation, problem-solving and strategic guidance for the account managers. You are the resource they come to before leadership, and the filter through which account-level updates, challenges and wins flow upward. The AMs should be better at their jobs because of your proximity to them.

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You are also the connective tissue between the account management layer and agency leadership, maintaining a pulse on every active account and making sure leadership has what it needs without being pulled into the day to day. You own that translation.

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That means direction, coaching, feedback, prioritization and development, and resisting the temptation to take over work that belongs to the people you are developing. The distinction matters here, because you will be running accounts of your own at the same time. On your accounts you do the work. On theirs you raise the standard of how it is done.

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Strategy and creative direction. Develop social strategies that reflect a real understanding of luxury hospitality culture, platform behavior and brand storytelling. Partner with the department leads across Creative, Influencer Relations, Digital and Community Management to hold execution standards across every client touchpoint. You are not expected to be the deepest specialist in any of those disciplines. You are expected to understand them well enough to lead the client, challenge the thinking, bring the right people into the room and make sure the agency arrives as one team. Play an active role in new business, RFP responses and agency positioning as a credible senior voice that prospects trust immediately.

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THE FIRST SIX MONTHS

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We are not hiring someone to maintain the current arrangement. The account management function needs a clearer operating rhythm, tighter standards on what leaves this agency, and more visibility across accounts than it has today. Six months in, we would expect the account managers to be working to a consistent standard, leadership to be receiving clarity rather than account detail, and clients to have noticed that something changed.

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If you are looking for an agency where the systems are already built and the job is to keep them running, this is not that role. If you have walked into an account layer that needed tightening and done it before without costing the team its confidence, we should talk.

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WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

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Someone who leads from knowledge rather than authority, close enough to every account to problem-solve in real time and represent the full portfolio to leadership with clarity. Cultured, curious, and visually literate, with a point of view on what exceptional creative work looks and feels like. Commercially aware, able to think beyond the brief, and comfortable speaking to performance data in front of a client without needing to be the expert in the room. Comfortable across a distributed team and multiple time zones, and flexible enough to make that work without being asked twice.

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We work in hospitality, and we care about it. You should have a real affinity for hotels, resorts, travel, food and drink, golf and the culture around them. You do not need to have spent your career in ultra-luxury hotels. Our portfolio is broader than that, and an excellent agency leader from a sophisticated consumer, lifestyle or travel background will be more valuable to us than a hospitality specialist who cannot lead a team.

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LOCATION AND WORKING STRUCTURE

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Based in or close to New York City. Relocation candidates will not be considered.

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We have an office in New York and much of our accounts team is remote, but this role carries a real in-person element that will grow as the team and client roster develop. New York-based clients will require in-person attendance. This is not a fully remote position, though there is flexibility to work outside the office.

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COMPENSATION AND TERMS

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$100,000 to $120,000

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Reports to the President and COO.

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Four weeks of paid annual leave.

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Salary reviewed at six months, in recognition of performance and commitment to the agency. Benefits package details provided during the interview process.

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Expected start: October 2026. We are interviewing now and moving quickly.

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HOW TO APPLY

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Email the following to View email address on ziprecruiter.com with the subject line "Account Director, Your Name". Incomplete applications will not progress.

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Your resume and short answers to all seven questions below. Answer the first four in a sentence each. 

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1. How many years have you worked inside an agency?
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2. How many years have you directly managed people inside an agency, with formal direct reports?
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3. How many people have you managed at one time, and in what roles?
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4. How many client accounts have you been responsible for at the same time, and at what level of seniority?
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5. Have you managed a remote or geographically distributed team? In no more than five sentences, tell us how you kept it accountable.
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6. In no more than five sentences, describe a client relationship or team situation that went badly wrong, and what you did about it.
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7. In no more than five sentences, what separates exceptional hotel storytelling from forgettable hotel marketing? There is no right answer, but how you think about this matters to us.
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We read every application that meets the requirements, and we will come back to you either way. Midnight Sunday is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds.