description:Creative Operations helps organize and evolve our brand creative processes, systems, tooling, projects, and programs that enable the team to scale and create world class brand experiences.
---
### Responsibilities
- Manage daily project intake and assignment
- Manage project workflows
- Create timelines and workback plans
- Manage key initiative milestones
- Manages vendor relationships and budgets
- Ensures all projects are setup for success and completed efficiently
### Requirements
- Collaborate with team members and partners to ensure success
- Resourceful and results-driven mindset leveraging iteration and continous improvement
- Strong understanding of best practices across different creative and marketing disciplines, audiences, and mediums
- Engage in constructive design critiques.
- Able to work independently, prioritize accordingly, and iterate quickly.
- Strong communication skills without a fear of over communication.
- You share our [values](/handbook/values/), and work in accordance with those values.
- Ability to use GitLab
## Individual Contributor Levels
### Senior Creative Operations Manager
The Senior Creative Operations Manager reports to the Director, Brand.
#### Job Level
The Senior Creative Operations Manager is outlined in the [Job Levels](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kcDb-A2uwchPtTNSJON65BdqS9P0KQmNz0fbNMZMt_M/edit?gid=819074618#gid=819074618) resource.
#### Responsibilities
- Work closely with the Brand Design Team on managing workload, assigning and triaging requests, and establishing priorities to ensure the team meets deadlines and delivers assets as needed
- Manage vendors and agency partners to help scale our team, including budget management, scope creation and approvals
- Collaborate with everyone across the Brand team and critical leaders and stakeholders in Marketing
- Lead stand-ups and project kick-offs, and participate in concept brainstorms
- Facilitate timely and clear communication between the design team, marketing stakeholders, and external partners
- Collaborate with marketing leads to determine priorities, manage key projects and problem solve requests when deadlines or asks are challenging
- Refine, improve, and scale our creative process to enhance speed and quality of delivery, standardizing processes for cross-discipline and cross-functional collaboration
- Contribute to quarterly and annual planning, representing the team's budget, capabilities, capacity and constraints
- Audit our tools, finding efficiency across departments for consolidation, while advocating for adding new tools and resources that add value to the team
- Establish and document processes and procedures and help centralize resources and assets for ease of access
- Contribute to the planning of team events and culture-building opportunities
#### Requirements
- Well-versed on the current trends in branding, creative, social and communications and can formulate plans that lead to the successful creation of brand experiences
- Experience designing, implementing, measuring and optimizing programs, processes, structures and/or systems for improving organizational efficiency
- Experience working within an internal agency or creative agency operations environment
- Proficiently understand the complex needs of creative and marketing teams, and effectively communicate the creative perspective and point of view to non-creative stakeholders
- A champion for Brand Creative and the Design inside and outside of GitLab
- Positive approach to problem solving through analytical thinking and operational efficacy
- Ability to prioritize multiple projects and tasks, manage changes, and reliably meet deadlines
- A genuine passion for brand creative and creative operations; track record instilling operational excellence for a creative team
- A strong creative eye and the ability to be a brand steward
#### Performance Indicators
- Ensures successful completion and review of design requests
- Reduces the turnaround time for the project intake and tiraging process of design requests
- Scales the design team quickly with vendors/contractors during high workload volume time periods
- Increases the effectivenss of our creative design process
## Career Ladder
The next step in the Creative Operations job family is not yet defined at GitLab.
- Several years of professional experience in design operations, program management, or a closely related field within a design organization.
- Demonstrated understanding of how design teams work, including research operations, design systems, tooling, and team rituals.
- Comfort working in highly agile, iterative environments where process is a living thing, not a fixed structure.
- Familiarity with accessibility standards and inclusive design practices as they relate to team operations and onboarding.
- Experience with design tooling ecosystems (Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, GitLab, research platforms, asset management systems, documentation systems) sufficient to evaluate, recommend, and implement.
- You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
- Strong bias for action and ability to develop daily priorities to achieve goals (manager of one).
- Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
- Working knowledge of GitLab workflows (issues, epics, merge requests) and comfort operating within a GitLab-first environment.
## Levels
### DesignOps Specialist
A DesignOps Specialist is assigned to a studio area within Upstream Studios, with exceptions made based on business needs.
#### Responsibilities
-**Operational support:** Maintain and improve the day-to-day tools, processes, and rituals that keep a design team running, including scheduling, documentation, and tooling administration.
-**Onboarding:** Own the onboarding experience for new designers in their area, ensuring people arrive with the context, access, and orientation they need to contribute quickly.
-**Ritual stewardship:** Support recurring team rituals (critiques, retrospectives, planning ceremonies) by owning the logistics, documentation, and follow-through.
-**Creative product fluency:** Develop working knowledge of how design work moves from intent to output, including where handoffs break and coordination overhead accumulates.
-**Handbook contribution:** Keep the team's handbook pages accurate, current, and useful. Write documentation that reflects how work actually happens.
-**Tooling support:** Identify tooling gaps, evaluate options, and pilot solutions that improve how the team works. Drive adoption by building context around why a tool earns its place.
-**Cross-functional coordination:** Coordinate with adjacent teams (Engineering, Product, Brand) on operational needs, identifying dependencies and keeping work moving.
-**Vendor and agency coordination:** Develop working knowledge of how the design organization sources and engages external vendors and agencies. Contribute to building the systems that surface quality and timeline signals, so the right people have the information they need to act.
-**Metrics tracking:** Track and report on basic team health metrics, flagging patterns that warrant attention from design leadership.
#### Requirements
A DesignOps Specialist is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities with reliability, attention to detail, and a commitment to making the team around them more effective.
### Senior DesignOps Specialist
A Senior DesignOps Specialist is assigned to a studio area within Upstream Studios, with exceptions made based on business needs.
#### Responsibilities
-**Process improvement:** Identify friction in how design work gets done and lead improvements, not just to fix what is broken but to raise the baseline of how the team operates.
-**Onboarding systems:** Own and evolve the onboarding experience as a system, not a checklist. Build the infrastructure that makes every new hire's first weeks productive.
-**Ritual design:** Design and improve team rituals with intention, evaluating whether each one earns its time and proposing changes when it does not.
-**Tooling strategy:** Evaluate tooling options, build the case for adoption or retirement, and manage transitions with minimal disruption.
-**Metrics and insight:** Build basic operational dashboards and translate data into clear recommendations. Move beyond tracking to drawing conclusions.
-**Cross-studio coordination:** Work across studio seams to resolve operational friction that affects more than one team. Build the relationships that make coordination feel easy.
-**Creative operations:** Design and improve the systems that move design work from intake to completion, including how work gets prioritized, reviewed, and handed off. The goal is reducing coordination overhead, not managing it.
-**Documentation standards:** Set documentation standards for your area and coach teammates on writing that is useful rather than merely complete.
-**Vendor and agency systems:** Build and improve the systems that surface quality and timeline signals across vendor and agency engagements.
-**Mentoring:** Guide more junior DesignOps practitioners, sharing methods and helping them build judgment, not just task completion.
#### Requirements
A Senior DesignOps Specialist is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while demonstrating independent judgment, proactive improvement, and the ability to build systems that outlast any single project.
### Staff DesignOps Specialist
A Staff DesignOps Specialist works across Upstream Studios, not bound to a single area. Their impact is felt at the studio level.
#### Responsibilities
-**Operating system design:** Own the design of how Upstream Studios operates as a whole. Identify gaps, redundancies, and brittle dependencies across teams and drive improvements that raise the floor for everyone.
-**Career development infrastructure:** Build the infrastructure that supports designer growth, including onboarding, career ladders, performance clarity, and skill development pathways.
-**Tooling and systems strategy:** Lead evaluation and adoption of tools at the studio level. Make the case to leadership, manage rollout, and track outcomes against the original rationale.
-**Metrics and organizational health:** Define what good looks like for design team health and build the measurement systems that make it visible. Bring data to leadership conversations with clear implications, not just numbers.
-**Cross-functional influence:** Build operational alignment with Product, Engineering, Brand, and People partners. Represent DesignOps as a strategic function, not a coordination layer.
-**Executive relationships:** Build and maintain working relationships with VP-level partners across Engineering, Product, Marketing, and Event and PR functions. DesignOps operates at the seam between design and the rest of the organization; these relationships are how influence travels.
-**Vendor and agency strategy:** Build the infrastructure for sourcing, evaluating, and retaining external vendors and agencies. Own the systems that make quality review and due date visibility consistent across engagements.
-**Contribution models:** Define how contribution works within Upstream Studios: how work gets assigned, how capacity is understood, how cross-team collaboration stays coherent at scale.
-**Ritual and cadence architecture:** Design the studio-wide rhythm of work, from planning cycles to review cadences to retrospectives. Make the cadence serve the work, not the calendar.
-**Mentoring and team development:** Coach Senior and DesignOps Specialists toward greater ownership and judgment. Be the person who raises the craft of DesignOps itself.
#### Requirements
A Staff DesignOps Specialist is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while coaching team members to operate with greater independence, and while driving improvements that compound across the entire studio over time.
### Principal DesignOps Specialist
A Principal DesignOps Specialist operates at the company level, shaping how design functions across GitLab and establishing the DesignOps discipline itself as a mature practice.
#### Responsibilities
-**Organizational design:** Shape the operating model for design at GitLab, including how teams are structured, how they collaborate, and how they scale. Bring a systems perspective to organizational decisions that most people treat as one-offs.
-**Strategic program leadership:** Lead the most complex, cross-functional operational initiatives in Upstream Studios, from large-scale tool migrations to company-wide onboarding redesigns to new contribution models.
-**Metrics and impact:** Define the measurement strategy for design impact at GitLab. Connect team health, contribution patterns, and operational metrics to business outcomes in ways that are credible and useful to executive leadership.
-**DesignOps discipline:** Establish DesignOps as a recognized discipline within GitLab. Define what the function is, what it owns, and what excellence looks like at each level of the career ladder.
-**Executive engagement:** Represent Upstream Studios in leadership discussions, bringing clear positions backed by evidence. Influence organizational decisions before they become operational constraints.
-**Research operations:** Partner with the Research Operations team to ensure design research needs are represented and supported, contributing to shared infrastructure, synthesis methods, and knowledge management as the function matures.
-**Industry presence:** Contribute to the DesignOps community externally through writing, speaking, or participation in relevant industry conversations. Represent GitLab's approach as a model worth sharing.
-**Skills development:** Identify growth opportunities for DesignOps practitioners across the team, build targeted development plans, and create pathways that connect skill-building to career progression.
#### Requirements
A Principal DesignOps Specialist is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while fostering a culture of strategic ownership across the DesignOps function and driving outcomes that make the entire design organization measurably more effective.
### Distinguished DesignOps Specialist
A Distinguished DesignOps Specialist represents the highest level of individual contribution in the DesignOps discipline at GitLab. They shape organizational strategy, define industry thinking, and are the person other design leaders look to when the hardest operational problems need solving.
#### Responsibilities
-**Executive partnership:** Partner with design, product, and people leadership to shape organizational strategy, ensuring DesignOps perspective is present in decisions about team structure, investment, and company direction.
-**Organizational strategy:** Own the most complex, cross-functional operational challenges at GitLab, including how the design organization scales, how it adapts to new working models, and how it sustains quality as complexity grows.
-**Discipline definition:** Define what DesignOps means at GitLab and establish the frameworks, standards, and principles that guide DesignOps practice across the organization and potentially across the industry.
-**Measurement and accountability:** Build the measurement architecture that connects design operations to company outcomes. Make design impact legible to the board, to investors, and to cross-functional partners.
-**Scaling and resilience:** Anticipate organizational inflection points and build the operational infrastructure to meet them. A Distinguished DesignOps Specialist does not react to scale; they design for it.
-**Industry leadership:** Shape the DesignOps industry through keynotes, publications, and community leadership. Build GitLab's reputation as a place that has figured out how to run a design organization at scale.
-**Organizational development:** Partner with design leadership on team structure, career progression, and organizational health. Mentor Principal and Staff practitioners. Cultivate a culture of operational excellence across Upstream Studios.
-**Strategic goal setting:** Partner with leadership to define operational goals that drive company results, ensuring DesignOps initiatives are measurable and connected to business outcomes at the highest level.
#### Requirements
A Distinguished DesignOps Specialist is expected to meet the base requirements and execute their responsibilities while driving a culture of accountability across the DesignOps function and coaching others to achieve ambitious goals at organizational scale.
## Performance Indicators
Success is measured by the health and effectiveness of the design organization, not by the volume of processes managed:
- Onboarding time-to-contribution for new designers
- Designer-reported confidence in tools, rituals, and role expectations
- Reduction in operational friction that blocks design work from reaching its potential
- Cross-functional coordination quality as perceived by Product, Engineering, and Brand partners
- Handbook completeness and accuracy as a reflection of how work actually happens
Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below, although it can change depending on calendar availability. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process.
### Screening Call
Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30-minute [screening call](/handbook/hiring/candidate-faq/#screening-call) with a member of our hiring team. In this call, we will discuss your experience, understand what you are looking for in a DesignOps role, talk about your work and approach to design operations, discuss your compensation expectations and reasons why you want to join GitLab, and answer any questions you have.
### Interview Process
1.**Interview with a member of the DesignOps team (1 hour):** This interview focuses on your experience in design operations, how you think about building systems versus managing work, and how you've navigated the needs of a design organization. Be prepared to walk through a specific initiative you owned — what problem you were solving, how you approached it, what you built or changed, and how you measured success.
1.**Interview with a designer (30 minutes):** This conversation focuses on how you build trust with the people you support and how you've translated designer needs into operational improvements. The interviewer will want to understand how you listen, how you prioritize, and how you know when a system is actually working.
1.**Interview with the Hiring Manager (1 hour):** This interview explores your strategic thinking, how you collaborate across functions, and how you approach the relationship between DesignOps and the designers you support. The conversation will focus on your point of view on what good DesignOps looks like and how you've developed that perspective through your work.
1.**Interview with a cross-functional partner from Product, Brand, or Engineering (30 minutes):** This conversation assesses how you build working relationships outside the design organization and how you've handled operational challenges that required alignment across teams.
### Offer
Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer through a video or phone call.
