Senior Associate - Design Operations

The Amex Digital Labs team drives innovation at American Express by originating, incubating, and managing products and platforms that are essential to our customers’ digital lives. We are a fast-paced team that leverages emerging technologies to develop digital payment and financial services products and engaging Membership experiences for Card Members. We often collaborate with technology companies and strategic partners to bring products to the market.

As a Design Operations Analyst within Digital Labs, you will help manage the day-to-day workflows, tools, and processes that support our growing UX and Design Strategy team.

You will work closely with Design Leadership, Project Managers, cross-product Operations and Strategy,  Global Supply Management, and our Product and Engineering partners to help coordinate design resources, manage vendor and agency relationships, track project activity, and improve how our team works together.

Qualifications

• 2-4 years of experience in design operations, project management, or creative agency coordination
• Strong organizational skills with demonstrated ability to manage budgets, vendors, and cross-functional workflows
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office tools, particularly Excel and PowerPoint.
• Familiarity with Airtable, Jira, Confluence, or similar project management and collaboration tools.
• Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States is required as the company will not pursue visa sponsorship for these positions.

Responsibilities

• Design Systems & Structures
• Maintain the Design Team’s A&P budget and track spending throughout the year.
• Maintain and evolve team operating resources, including ways-of-working documentation and shared knowledge repositories.
• Manage the structure, organization, and accessibility of Design team tools and workspaces, including Confluence, OneDrive, and relevant project tracking systems.
• Portfolio, Resourcing & Project Delivery
• Maintain incoming design requests, maintain the backlog (Air Table), manage resourcing, and balance bandwidth/workload across the team.
• Partner with Design Leadership and cross-functional stakeholders to translate incoming demand into capacity and resourcing plans.
• Maintain a consolidated view of active and upcoming design work, including priorities, owners, milestones, dependencies, risks, and resource commitments.
• Establish consistent project kickoff, status reporting, documentation (such as scorecards and measures of success), and handoff practices across the Design team.
• Design Practice Enablement
• Maintain and improve design team operating standards, templates, and collaborative ways of working.
• Coordinate onboarding and access to essential tools, resources, and working agreements for cross-functional partners.
• Support team rituals, planning sessions, retrospectives, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Promote consistent practices while preserving the flexibility needed for UX, research, and design strategy work.
• Serve as a coordination point for accessibility-related processes and resources within the Labs Design team, working with Labs Design team, Legal and Enterprise Design partners to maintain standards, documentation, and relevant team resources.
• Agency & Procurement Operations
• Support day-to-day coordination with external design agency partners, including tracking deliverables, timelines, statements of work (SOWs), compliance monitoring, yearly due diligence processing, processing invoices, and related documentation.
• Assist with SOW processing and coordination with Sourcing & Procurement.
• Support new agency onboarding.
• Conduct ongoing agency assessment — gather feedback, review partnership health, and ensure agency roster meets evolving team needs.