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, you’ll 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. You’ll improve workflows and coach the team, but you’ll also use your pre-press and production expertise to review complex artwork, solve production challenges, and step into design production when needed.

Your Responsibilities and Impact

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: You’ll 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.

Who You Are

• 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: You’re 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.
  

Requirements

Your Experience

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 processes—ideally 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.)
  

Benefits

• Salary: $2,000 -  $2,700 (Mon–Fri, working schedule within 1–2 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.