Product Design Operations Lead

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About Anthropic

Anthropic's mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

As Anthropic's first Design Ops hire, you'll establish the operational foundation that enables our growing design team to scale efficiently while maintaining high-quality output and creative autonomy. You'll work closely with design leadership to build systems, processes, and partnerships that support our team's mission to create exceptional AI product experiences.

Working within our Product Design organization and collaborating across Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, and Brand teams, you'll develop operational strategies that balance pragmatic solutions with the flexibility needed in our fast-moving AI product environment. The ideal candidate excels at building scalable processes while fostering cross-functional collaboration and team culture.

Responsibilities

Team & talent development

• Design and implement comprehensive onboarding programs for new designers
• Serve as trusted advisor to leadership on operational excellence and team health
• Partner with design leadership to establish and execute a Design Ops roadmap aligned with team needs and business goals

Operational excellence

• Implement systems for tracking and optimizing resource utilization across design projects
• Act as operational liaison between Product Design and Engineering, PM, Marketing, and Brand teams for major initiatives
• Manage relationships with external vendors, contractors, and design partners
• Optimize tool licensing and platform management (including Figma administration)
• Establish quality assurance frameworks ensuring consistent, high-quality design output and execution
• Develop scalable processes supporting distributed teams and asynchronous collaboration

Culture building & knowledge management

• Organize design events, workshops, and team-building activities
• Create systems for recognizing and celebrating team milestones and achievements
• Build and maintain comprehensive team documentation library (design principles, team directory, rituals & norms)
• Partner with design systems team on implementation and adoption strategies
• Create accessible research insights databases and pattern libraries

What Makes You Successful in This Role

• You balance creative freedom with operational efficiency, creating lightweight processes that enable rather than constrain
• You're passionate about AI technology and understand the unique challenges of designing for rapidly evolving AI products
• You excel at building bridges between diverse stakeholder groups and translating between technical and creative perspectives

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in design operations, program management, or similar cross-functional roles, with demonstrated expertise in building scalable processes
• Have proven track record of leading operational transformation initiatives and managing change with minimal disruption
• Have experience building systems from scratch, particularly in high-growth startup environments
• Thrive in fast-paced environments and are comfortable with the ambiguity inherent in AI product development
• Can balance immediate operational needs with long-term foundation building under dynamic conditions
• Have experience working with design teams of 40+ people, ideally in technology or AI/ML product environments

The expected salary range for this position is:

Annual Salary:$260,000—$310,000 USD

Logistics

Education requirements: We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.