Design Operations Lead: Systems & AI-Driven Coordination

Mistral; Paris; Remote; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Relocation support

Retirement plans

Wellness programs

Meal and transportation allowances

Job summary

Mistral seeks a Product Operations Manager (Design) to own the operating system of the design team, defining cadences, rituals, and the single source of truth that keeps the team aligned and productive. You will build processes from scratch, automate coordination with AI, and coordinate across Brand, Marketing, Product Design, and GTM to ensure timely delivery.

You will report to the Head of Product Operations, collaborating with the Head of Design and the design team to shape a scalable

Qualifications

• 6–10 years of experience in design operations, product operations, program management, or a chief-of-staff role within a creative or product organization.
• A founding design-ops mindset — you’ve built operational disciplines from scratch, not just maintained inherited ones.
• Comfortable automating with AI tools to remove repetitive overhead, while equally skilled at coordinating people and building coalitions without authority.
• Strong systems thinking — you design repeatable rhythms and processes, not just run meetings.
• Design literacy — enough background to have felt the pain designers feel and to be credible with the team.
• A make-it-happen attitude: positive, bias to action, unblocks rather than escalates.
• Excellent communication and synthesis skills — you turn scattered signals into a shared source of truth.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and define your own scope in a role with no playbook and no team to delegate to.

Responsibilities

• Define the operating system of the design team — the cadences, forums, rituals, and source-of-truth that keep the team aligned and moving forward.
• Own the weekly and quarterly cadences, from leadership syncs and critiques to planning, retros, and headcount-cycle inputs.
• Coordinate the Brand × Marketing and Product × Product Design interlocks so design work is surfaced with enough lead time and dependencies are planned, not discovered late.
• Establish how the team tracks and shares out work — a single source of truth for status, and the forums where design is made legible to the rest of the org.
• Design and hold decision-making forums so decisions get made, recorded, and not relitigated.
• Separate ritual from overhead — keep the cadences that create alignment and cut the ones that are just tax.
• Automate repetitive coordination, reporting, and tracking with AI so the team spends time on design, not admin.
• Bring the wider Product Operations toolkit to the design team — data and analytics for transparent reporting, structured feedback loops and early-access programmes, and launch coordination that aligns design work with product release cycles and go-to-market timing.
• Partner with marketing, PMs, engineering and GTM to align design work with go-to-market timing and surface what’s shipping.

Skills

Design operations

Product operations

Program management

Chief of staff

AI automation

Systems thinking

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Mistral seeks a Product Operations Manager (Design) to own the operating system of the design team, defining cadences, rituals, and the single source of truth that keeps the team aligned and productive. You will build processes from scratch, automate coordination with AI, and coordinate across Brand, Marketing, Product Design, and GTM to ensure timely delivery.

You will report to the Head of Product Operations, collaborating with the Head of Design and the design team to shape a scalable