Director of Operations

✨ About the Company

Makeship empowers influencers, creators, and brands of all sizes to develop and launch limited-edition products that matter to their fans. Leveraging our design, manufacturing, and marketing expertise, we work with our partners to bring their products to life through our community-powered crowdfunding platform. Each product is given a window of 21 days to be funded by the community before we produce and ship to fans worldwide. We put our brand behind every product and guarantee quality and ethical sourcing.

We're profitable, we have a three-year revenue growth of over 200%, ranking us 97th in 2024 and 86th on The Globe and Mail’s Canada’s Top Growing Companies of 2025 list. We are also excited to announce that Makeship has officially been Great Place to Work-Certified™ for 3 years in a row! Learn more about us at Makeship.com.

🧑‍💻 About the Role

As an early team member, you’ll play a huge role in shaping our culture, our process, and the future of Makeship. Every day, you’ll collaborate, learn more about the content creation space, and watch your work impact the company and the community! We want this to be the best work experience of your life, so we’ll pay you well, offer great benefits, invest deeply in your growth, and welcome you with our branded swag. You will also be joining one of Canada's fastest-growing start-ups!

🌟 What We Are Looking For

We are looking for a Director of Operations who will own the end-to-end operational health of Makeship, from creator onboarding, through merch design and manufacturing, to the moment a product lands in a fan’s hands. This is a foundational, high-visibility role for someone who is energized by ambiguity, thinks in systems, and wants to build, not just maintain, the processes that let us scale. 

We are looking for a leader who can zoom out to diagnose where our operations are creating friction, risk, or hidden cost, and zoom in to lead the teams that fix it. As our Director of Operations, you’ll lead our Business Operations and Customer Support teams, oversee our supply chain, and partner closely with Systems Engineering to create the operational infrastructure that sets up the rest of the org for success. Reporting directly to our VP of Product & Technology, you will evolve how we operate so we can keep pace with our rapid growth as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies.

🚀 Your Key Responsibilities

• Business health oversight: Analyze the health of our campaign operations end to end, identifying inefficiencies and risks, and building a holistic view of business health
• Business operations leadership: Lead the Business Operations team, ensuring smooth day-to-day execution of every campaign while evolving our internal workflows and systems in partnership with Systems Engineering.
• Supply chain management: Keep merch creation smooth from manufacturing through fulfillment, balancing cost, quality, and timeliness across our manufacturing pipeline and internal teams.
• Customer support leadership: Lead the Customer Support team, owning the quality, responsiveness, and tooling behind our 1:1 relationship with fans.
• Insights & feedback loops: Equip teams across the org with regular insights - support trends, sentiment tracking, research findings, and internal metrics.
• Research enablement: Set up the tools and processes that make it easy for teams to reach creators and fans and learn directly from them.

🧠 What You Bring

• 8+ years of experience in operations, business operations, or a related leadership role, ideally within a high-growth D2C, e-commerce, or marketplace business.
• A track record of designing and scaling processes and teams to match a rapidly growing business, not just running what already exists.
• Strong analytical instincts; you can look at a process and see where it's quietly costing the business time, money, or trust.
• Experience partnering with manufacturing or supply chain partners to balance cost, quality, and speed.
• Excellent cross-functional leadership skills; you can influence and coordinate across engineering, design, finance, and external partners without needing direct authority over all of them.

👀 Bonus

• Experience leading customer-facing or support teams
• Experience in the creator economy, crowdfunding, or merchandise/apparel industries.
• Experience managing or evaluating outsourced research or agency relationships.
• Experience building a function from the ground up inside a scaling startup.
• Familiarity with drop-shipping or overseas (e.g., China-based) manufacturing operations.
• Mandarin fluency

🎁 Benefits & Perks

• Work remotely anywhere in Canada and/or access any of our hubs
• Health and dental benefits from day 1
• 4 weeks of paid vacation (including paid time off on your birthday)
• An additional 1 week of paid time off during the winter holidays
• Virtual & In-Person Social Events
• Annual Paid Volunteer Day Off
• 1:1 RRSP Matching Program Up to 3%
• $500 Pre-Tax Annual Health & Wellness Allowance
• $400 Pre-Tax Home Office Setup Allowance
• $65 Pre-Tax Monthly Phone Allowance
• Maternity and Parental Leave Top-Up Program
• Education Assistance Program
• Employee Referral Program
• Tenured Rewards Program
  

Salary Band: $130-160k CAD per annum. Individual salaries will be dependent on unique skills, experience and qualifications.

Vacancy Status: Existing vacancy

AI Use Disclosure:
As part of our hiring process, we may use AI-powered tools to support tasks such as application screening and note-taking. These tools are used to assist our team, and all hiring decisions are made by humans.

We are committed to fair and unbiased hiring practices. If you require accommodations or have questions about how your application is assessed, please let us know.

At Makeship we are committed to fostering an environment that welcomes people of all backgrounds, experiences, and identities. We are passionate about building an equitable and inclusive culture for our unique and diverse team of employees which makes us Makeship. As an equal-opportunity employer, we value and embrace everyone's opinions and differences, and actively seek new Makeshippers who will work respectfully with our team, propelling our company and the community forward. If there are any accommodations we can provide to make your interview experience more accessible and inclusive, please let us know in your application.