Director of Creative Operations

About the role

Most ops roles exist to manage complexity. This one exists to eliminate it. We're looking for the rare operator who gets genuinely excited by the question: how do we do more with less, faster, and better? Not someone who documents workflows and calls it a day, but someone who believes deeply in the power of creativity, sweats the details, and sees AI not as a threat to great work but as the engine that lets a lean team punch way above its weight.

This role has one core mandate: make the Creative & Brand team operate at its highest possible level. You'll have significant ownership over how we plan, resource, budget, and scale our creative output across every channel and workstream. You'll be the connective tissue between creative ambition and operational reality, and you'll report directly into the VP of Creative & Brand.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Own creative operations across the entire Creative & Brand team, including workflow management, capacity planning, resource allocation, and roadmap planning.
• Build and maintain systems that remove friction and eliminate work about work, so the team spends more time making and less time managing.
• Build the AI-native operating layer for the Creative & Brand team. This is not about being a power user of Runway or Midjourney — it's about designing and shipping the agentic workflows, internal tools, and automations that change how the team works. You'll architect the systems that connect ideation tools, asset libraries, briefing flows, and trafficking pipelines into end-to-end workflows, and you'll own the measurement that proves they delivered a step change in throughput and quality — not marginal time savings.
• Partner with the Consumer AI team to identify where Creative & Brand workflows are ripe for agentic automation, and either build those tools yourself or scope and shepherd them through to production. You'll be the team's translator between creative reality and AI capability.
• Manage the team’s budget in partnership with the VP, working closely with finance and legal to ensure accurate forecasting, tracking, and reporting
• Own relationships with external agencies, vendors, and contractors from onboarding through delivery, including contract management and performance accountability.
• Serve as the primary cross-functional partner for teams including Performance Marketing, Product, and Partnerships, ensuring creative workstreams are aligned, prioritized, and resourced appropriately.
• Develop and maintain project management infrastructure across tools including ClickUp, Notion, and Slack, ensuring the team has clear visibility into what's in flight, what's coming, and what's at risk.
• Build scalable briefing, feedback, and approval processes that maintain quality and speed without creating bottlenecks.
• Track and report on team capacity, project throughput, and operational health, using data to drive better resourcing and planning decisions.
• Identify gaps in our operational model and proactively bring solutions.

Qualifications and Skills:

• 10+ years of experience in creative operations, project management, or program management, with at least several years at a director level, ideally within a high-growth in-house team or agency environment.
• You're an AI builder, not just an AI user. Being proficient with the tools — prompt libraries, preferred models, tuned personal workflows — is table stakes at Ethos and we expect it from everyone. What we're hiring for is the next level: the ability to build. agentic workflows and internal tools that drive a step change in a team's collective judgment and productivity. Come ready to discuss ~3 concrete examples — what you built, the trade-offs, what broke, what it unlocked. Side projects and personal tools. count; we know not every company is forward-leaning here, and we've seen people move from user to builder in days when they're wired for it.
• Proven track record building and optimizing creative operations, including managing transformation initiatives where success is measured by value delivered, not just tasks completed.
• Deep experience managing creative budgets, vendors, agencies, and contractors end to end, including working with legal and finance partners.
• Strong command of project management tools and creative workflows — you know how to build systems people actually use and you use data to tell the story of the team's impact.
• A genuine connector, you have a proven ability to partner with diverse stakeholders across creative, marketing, product, legal, and finance to drive alignment and move complex initiatives forward.
• A genuine belief in the power of creativity and a strong intuition for how creative teams work best.
• Clear, confident communicator who can advocate for new ways of working in a matrixed organization and make the case to leadership with data.
• Problem solver, not just a problem spotter, you come with solutions and you follow through.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and adaptable in a fast-moving, data-obsessed environment.

The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $150,000 - $266,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits.

You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/