Creative Operations Lead

Shopify’s Brand Design Studio is a multidisciplinary team of visual designers, writers, video creatives, front-end developers and motion designers. We create and build experiences that communicate the value of Shopify’s commerce products and platform—and the potential they enable.

Brand Design Studio is seeking two Creative Operations Leads to build and run the systems that make our creative engine fast, scalable, and effective. You will own portfolio planning and execution for large campaigns across the whole group, oversee high-priority programs, and systematize the operating model that lets our team deliver quality and volume at once. You’ll partner across all Marketing orgs, Marketing Ops, Design, Web, Legal, and Martech to ensure we invest time and budget in the most impactful work and measure what matters.

You have a strong mix of creative production and operations experience, can influence senior stakeholders, and know how to reduce manual toil, eliminate duplication, and focus teams on the highest priorities. You stay current on creative tech and AI, and you implement practical systems that scale global creative production without sacrificing quality. You’re comfortable in non traditional and rigid operations systems and can pivot quickly

What you’ll do

• Portfolio planning and prioritization
  • Co-lead quarterly and annual planning for across the group; define prioritization criteria, align on OKRs, and create a transparent roadmap tied to budget.
• Program management for high-impact campaigns
  • Own workback plans, dependencies, milestones, and approvals for flagship launches and evergreen performance programs.
  • Facilitate cross-functional rituals (standups, reviews, decision forums), maintain risk/issue logs, and ensure on-time, on-brief delivery.
• AI and automation
  • Evaluate, pilot, and deploy AI for copy and visual exploration, variant generation, autotagging, QC, and briefing support with clear guardrails.
  • Build prompt libraries, templates, and workflows; measure impact (time saved, variants produced, error reduction).
• Resource and vendor management
  • Build capacity and scenario models; allocate designers, writers, and motion/creative tech resources to priority work, create a bench of production vendors that can be actioned at any moment.
  • Stand up and manage an external vendor/agency bench for scalable, repeatable production; drive SOWs, rate cards, SLAs, and performance reviews.
• Process, governance, and quality
  • Define operating model, RACI, and playbooks for concepting, production, QA, localization, and launch.
  • Relentless pursue of systems of scale and accountability for both big and small projects
• Production at scale
  • Led Implementation of systems for modular creative (templates, toolkits, design tokens), dynamic and feed-based production, and localization at scale.
  • Contribute to optimize a DAM and taxonomy for asset versioning, rights, and reuse across channels and markets.
• Measurement and continuous improvement
  • Define and report Ops KPIs: cycle time, on-time delivery, cost per asset, reuse rate, defect/QA rate, stakeholder satisfaction, % automated.
  • Lead postmortems and quarterly business reviews; turn insights into process and tooling improvements.
• Stakeholder engagement and change management
  • Influence senior leaders across Growth, Revenue, Product Marketing, and Design; make trade-offs explicit and secure alignment on priorities.
  • Stay ahead of all changes, needs and opportunities for better alignment and pivots where needed

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years in creative/design/marketing operations, including 4+ years program managing large, integrated campaigns.
• Proven experience scaling creative production for paid social, display/video, search, affiliates, email/CRM, and web/landing pages, including experimentation and personalization.
• Demonstrated portfolio management: roadmapping, OKRs, budget and vendor management, capacity planning, and scenario modeling.
• Track record building intake, triage, and prioritization systems with clear SLAs, brief standards, and governance.
• Tools expertise:
  • Project/portfolio: GitHub and Appsheet
  • Design/production: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Asset management: Bynder
  • Reporting: Looker, Tableau, or equivalent
• AI and automation: Hands-on deploying generative and production AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Midjourney/Firefly, Runway, Figma plugins) to reduce manual work and increase output, with governance and measurement.
• Agency/vendor leadership: sourcing, onboarding, RFP, SOWs, rate negotiations, SLAs, and performance management.
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management; able to simplify complexity, make decisions with imperfect information, and drive alignment.
• Strong attention to detail with speed; comfortable operating in ambiguity and setting clear processes where none exist.

Nice to have

• Experience in ecommerce/SaaS or global, multi-market campaigns.
• Localization operations at scale; knowledge of privacy/legal/compliance in marketing.
• Familiarity with Shopify’s ecosystem and merchants’ growth journeys.