Udemy
Design Ops Manager
🇺🇸 Hybrid - San Francisco, CA
🕑 Full-Time
💰 $168K - $210K
💻 Product Development
🗓️ May 21st, 2025
Figma
Miro
Edtech.com's Summary
Udemy is hiring a Design Ops Manager. The role involves scaling and supporting the Product Design & Research team's impact by streamlining workflows, driving operational excellence, and fostering a culture of collaboration. The manager will partner closely with design, research, product, and engineering teams to establish processes and programs, enabling high-quality, efficient design work and fostering an inclusive and connected work environment.
Highlights
- Streamline workflows and drive operational excellence for the Product Design & Research team.
- Essential tools include Figma, Dovetail, Miro, and Maze.
- Compensation ranges from $168,000 to $210,000 USD plus benefits and equity.
- Requires 5+ years in DesignOps or similar roles with strong program management skills.
- Establish scalable planning frameworks and improve collaboration across disciplines.
- Manage documentation, tooling, and vendor relationships.
- Lead initiatives like design reviews, offsites, and retrospectives.
- Track and report on team metrics for strategic decision-making.
- Foster an inclusive culture of high-quality design and continuous improvement.
Design Ops Manager Full Description
Design Ops Manager
San Francisco, CA
About us
At Udemy, we’re on a mission to transform lives through learning. Through our intelligent skills platform and a global community of instructors, we’ve helped nearly 80 million learners and more than 17,000 organizations achieve their goals. Come join us in ensuring everyone, everywhere has access to the skills they need to unlock their potential and create possibilities for themselves and others. Learn more about us on our company page.
Where we work
Udemy is a global company headquartered in San Francisco, with additional U.S. offices in Denver and Austin, and international hubs in Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico, and Türkiye. This is an in-office position, requiring three days a week in the office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) and flexibility on Mondays and Fridays.
About this role
We are seeking an experienced Design Operations Manager to help scale and support the impact of our Product Design & Research team. You will help streamline our workflows, drive operational excellence, and foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement across a globally distributed team.
This role is ideal for someone who thrives on creating clarity in complexity, brings a systems-thinking mindset, and is passionate about enabling designers and researchers to do their best work. You’ll partner closely with design and research leadership, product and engineering partners, and cross-functional peers to establish processes, tools, rituals, and programs that support high-quality, efficient design work at scale.
You will also play a key role in building a culture of high-quality design while fostering an environment where people feel connected, supported, and have fun along the way.
About you
- You’re a natural systems thinker who sees patterns, optimizes for scale, and brings structure where it’s needed most.
- You have strong program management skills and know how to navigate ambiguity while still delivering on time.
- You are empathetic and collaborative, with a track record of building trusted relationships across functions.
- You’re passionate about design and research and understand what good craft and process look like, even if you don’t do the design work yourself.
- You’re organized, detail-oriented, and able to manage multiple streams of work without losing sight of the big picture.
- You communicate clearly and concisely and are comfortable synthesizing ideas in documentation and presentations.
What you’ll do
- Partner with design and research leadership to define and evolve team operating models, workflows, and best practices
- Coordinate design and research initiatives across multiple product areas and stakeholders
- Build and maintain scalable planning frameworks for roadmapping, prioritization, and resource allocation
- Improve collaboration across disciplines by facilitating communication, aligning on shared goals, and managing stakeholder expectations
- Own tooling, documentation, and vendor relationships for design and research operations (e.g., Figma, Dovetail, Miro, Maze, etc.)
- Lead team-wide rituals like design reviews, offsites, onboarding, and retrospectives
- Identify and address friction points in the design and development lifecycle, proposing data-informed improvements
- Drive programs that support team health, onboarding, learning & development, and inclusive culture
- Track and report on team metrics to support planning, hiring, and strategic decision-making
- Help scale our DesignOps foundation as the team grows, with an eye toward sustainability, equity, and excellence
What you’ll have
- 5+ years of experience in DesignOps, UX Program Management, or a related role within a design-forward organization
- Experience managing complex, multi-track projects and operational initiatives across a global team
- Familiarity with design and research workflows, tools, and best practices in modern product development
- Ability to influence without authority and navigate organizational complexity with empathy and confidence
- Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication skills, including documentation and stakeholder presentations
- Demonstrated ability to work autonomously while staying aligned to team and company priorities
- A passion for learning, continuous improvement, and making the work better for everyone involved
At Udemy, we strive to be transparent around compensation. Actual compensation for this role is based on several factors, including but not limited to job-related skills, qualifications, experience, and specific work location due to differences in the cost of labor. In addition to a base salary, this role is also eligible for benefits and equity.
Hiring Compensation Range
$168,000—$210,000 USD
We understand that not everyone will match each of the above qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!
Life at Udemy
We aspire to be as vibrant and dynamic as the communities we serve, as inquisitive as those who use our platform, and as revolutionary as the future we strive to open for everyone. Here are some of the things we love about life at Udemy:
- We’re invested in creating an inclusive environment that welcomes a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. From creating employee resource groups, ensuring we’re a Fair Pay Workplace, and building a flexible work culture, our belonging, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BEDI) initiatives always put our people first. We want you to be able to bring your authentic self to work because when we all do, we’re better for it.
- Learning is what we do – inside and out. Our Learning & Development team is second to none, helping ensure your journey is one of continuous progression. You’ll also have unlimited access to Udemy courses, monthly UDays (meeting-free professional development days), and a generous annual professional development stipend.
- Our reason to exist is to revolutionize learning – that calls for taking risks and learning from failures. Whether it’s our hackathons (a company-wide effort to envision new possibilities for our product) or sharing our prototypes, we see experimentation as a crucial step on the path to success.
- We’re committed to creating world-class employee experiences and are proud of the recognition of this by Great Place to Work.
Of course, the best thing about being part of Udemy is knowing your work makes a difference for people and organizations around the world. You’ve got the skills; why not use them to help others develop theirs?
At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability.
Our Benefits Start with U
Our benefits start with you and were built to provide you and your family with the protection and care you need, making it easy to access the right coverage when you need it most. Benefits vary by region, and we encourage applicants to review our US Benefits, Ireland Benefits & Turkiye Benefits pages to get an understanding of some of the benefits we offer. For details on region-specific benefits, please refer to the information provided during the hiring process.
Benefits outlined are provided as a general overview and may vary depending on the location, role, and employment classification. All benefits are subject to change at the discretion of the organization and in accordance with applicable laws and policies.
Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.
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