Design Operations Lead

Do you enjoy leading designers improving how work gets done and using systems automation and AI to raise both quality and speed Keep reading!

At our company every customer design needs to become accurate production-ready packaging artwork: quickly consistently and without mistakes.

As our Design Operations Lead youll lead our remote team of four designers and own how the team performs and develops. Your mission is to deliver high-quality work within our service levels while continuously improving the processes systems and tools that make the team faster and easier to scale.

This is a hands-on leadership role. Youll improve workflows and coach the team but youll also use your pre-press and production expertise to review complex artwork solve production challenges and step into design production when needed.

Your focus will be on building a high-performing Design operation while staying close enough to the work to support the team when needed:

• Improve How We Work: Identify bottlenecks and repetitive work then build smarter workflows systems automations and AI-supported processes that make the team faster and easier to scale.
  

• Lead and Develop the Team: Create structure clarity and accountability across our remote Design team through strong planning feedback performance follow-up and individual development.
  

• Own Artwork Quality: Maintain a high quality bar review complex customer artwork and catch issues before they reach customers or production.
  

• Collaborate Across the Business: Represent Design across the company and improve how the team works with colleagues throughout the customer and production journey.
  

• Stay Hands-On: Step into customer design production when needed from reviewing and correcting artwork in Illustrator to helping the team through busy periods.
  

What Success Looks Like: Youll quickly take ownership of the Design operation establish a strong management rhythm and start implementing measurable process improvements. Within your first three months you and the team should consistently keep 99.9% of customer design requests within our two-hour service level.

• An Operational Leader: You enjoy keeping a team organized prioritizing workloads and making sure deadlines are consistently met. You are comfortable creating structure in a fast-moving environment where both speed and accuracy matter.
  

• A Sharp Eye for Quality: You notice the details others miss take ownership of the final result and want to catch mistakes before they reach customers or production.
  

• Always Looking for a Better Way: Inefficient processes and repetitive manual work make you want to fix them. You enjoy building smarter systems and exploring automation and AI to reduce errors save time and help the team work better.
  

• Passionate About Helping People Succeed: You give clear actionable feedback create accountability and genuinely enjoy developing people and raising the standard of the team.
  

• A Hands-On Leader: Youre comfortable switching between leading the team improving processes reviewing artwork and jumping into production yourself when needed. You care more about getting the job done well than staying within a narrow job description.
  

To succeed in this role you should bring a strong combination of production design expertise pre-press knowledge operational thinking and people coordination or leadership:

• 4 years of relevant experience in graphic design pre-press packaging print production production artwork or a similar production-focused field.
  

• Strong hands-on experience producing reviewing correcting and preparing production-ready artwork for professional print including improving low-quality or unsuitable customer files.
  

• Advanced Adobe Illustrator skills and a deep understanding of professional print preparation including vector graphics CMYK spot colors and production artwork.
  

• Experience in high-volume deadline-driven environments and improving workflows systems or processesideally using automation or AI to increase speed reliability and scalability.
  

• Leadership or coordination experience: Proven track record leading or coordinating designers or production workflows and comfortable owning a small remote team while remaining hands-on. (We are also open to candidates ready to take their first formal leadership step who have demonstrated strong ownership and operational capabilities.)
  

• Salary: $2000 - $2700 (MonFri working schedule within 12 hours of CET).
  

• Compensation & Leave: Competitive salary 6 weeks of paid time off per year pay during sick days and generous paid parental leave.
  

• Overtime Policy: Overtime is generally not expected; if required it is fully compensated.