Design Operations Manager

• We lean in: ownership over titles, outcomes over intentions.

The role

At Legora, we're building the category-defining AI product for legal work. Our design team is growing fast across Stockholm, London and New York.

Design is being rebuilt for the AI era: new tools, new workflows, humans and agents building together, and a higher bar on both speed and craft. The Design Operations Manager is the operator who makes that change land at Legora. You will partner with design and product leadership to structure the org, set the operating rhythms and lead the cross-functional initiatives that free designers to spend their time on product and craft.

You own org structure, planning, prioritisation and the systems that keep everything moving. Your job is to make sure the right things happen at the right time, across every team.

You will report to the Head of Design. This is a hands-on senior role: you design the systems and you run them.

This position can be based in Stockholm, NYC, or London.

What you will be doing

• Keep a live, accurate map of how design is organised against what it needs to deliver. Flag structural gaps before they show up as missed deadlines or duplicated work, and make sure every headcount decision has a clear rationale tied to what the team actually needs.

• Own how design hires. Tie every open role to a named strategic priority before it is approved, agree the archetype and level before the loop starts, run the process end to end with our Talent team, and own onboarding and offboarding for designers.

• Put design on a stable planning cadence and make reviews produce decisions and unblock work. Give design clear goals and bets that ladder to company-wide OKRs, and when priorities shift, make the tradeoffs visible so they get made on purpose.

• Be the DRI for cross-team programmes and move them from vague problem to shipped outcome on a visible timeline. Product, Engineering and PMM should be able to see where design work stands at any point without asking.

• Help move the team to more agentic ways of working and keep documentation and process current as they change. Track adoption and impact so the org can tell what is working from what is still an experiment.

• Make sure a written quality bar exists for design work and gets applied consistently, and build the reporting that shows, cycle over cycle, whether speed gains are costing us quality, so that tradeoff gets decided early.

Who you are

• 4–6+ years of experience running operations, programmes or a chief-of-staff function inside a product or design organisation, ideally through a period of rapid growth.

• A track record of building org structures, planning cadences and hiring processes from scratch, and the judgment to know which ones earn their keep.

• A systems thinker who is comfortable with ambiguity: you see the structural gap before it becomes a missed deadline, and you close gaps that are technically someone else's problem.

• Fluent in how modern product teams build, and an early adopter of AI-native and agentic ways of working who brings others along.

• A strong communicator who makes tradeoffs legible and gets product, engineering and leadership behind a decision.

• Line management experience is a plus. Caring about design, and the people who do it, is required.