Director, Creative Operations & Production

Gametime is a mobile-first marketplace for last-minute tickets to live sports, music and theater in more than 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada. We exist to bring people together through great live experiences, the once-in-a-lifetime moments fans remember. We're a profitable, growing company, and we're building the creative engine to match our ambition.

Creative at Gametime has outgrown the setup it was built on, and you will design what replaces it.

Our team was originally built to produce paid social conversion marketing at scale. The mandate is increasingly multi-channel and full-funnel -- paid social, but also: CRM, TV, product visual merchandising, creator content, organic social and more. You will build the operating backbone that makes that possible: how work is requested, prioritized, produced and measured, and where AI and automation do the work versus where human craft stays.

You'll report to the VP of Creative and lead a small team (a Sr. Creative Ops Manager, a Creator Manager and an embedded freelance Senior Producer) plus a flexible bench of freelancers and vendors. This is a new leadership layer and a player-coach role. We are not hiring someone to maintain a system; we're hiring the person who evolves and/or rebuilds it.

You and your team will be accountable for three key outcomes. How you get there is yours to design.

1. An operating backbone for Creative

• Define the vision and roadmap for Creative Ops, extending and evolving what exists today for paid social to new stakeholders and workstreams.
• Intake, prioritization, resourcing and delivery standards, and the metrics that prove they work: turnaround time, cost per asset, throughput and on-time delivery.
• Own the handoffs between Creative and: Growth, Brand, Product, Legal and Finance – and make sure new processes and guidelines get adopted and stay current.
• Accountability for the creative tooling stack (Asana, Dropbox, Higgsfield and what comes next) and the reporting leadership uses to run Creative.

1. A capacity and AI model that scales

• Design our flex model: the right mix of full-time, contract and vendor resources, with playbooks to scale up and down quickly. Own the vendor and freelance bench, including sourcing, rate cards, SOWs and performance.
• Strategy and management of our production budget and forecast, a seven-figure budget, in partnership with the VP of Creative, Finance and FP&A.
• Set the strategy for what we automate and what stays human, grounded in a business case for each. Own the roadmap for AI in production workflows (versioning, resizing, editing, asset management, QA): pilots, rollout and measured savings.
• Own governance for AI-generated and creator content, including likeness, usage rights and creator agreements, working with Legal.

1. A team and a quality bar

• Lead, mentor and grow high-potential talent and build a bench around them over time.
• Set the quality bar for video-first output, and evaluate and direct our production partners. Our contract producer currently carries day-to-day A/V production; you will set the standard and hold it.
• Make the creator program a repeatable production system: the economics, workflows and standards behind recruiting, negotiating contracts, briefing, producing and paying part-time creators, with the Creator Manager owning day-to-day operations and strategy.
• Partner closely with creative directors, creative strategy and our Brand and Growth Marketing partners so production serves the work, and bring cost and capacity into planning early.
• Stay close to the work. Step into stakeholder meetings, vendor decisions and intake when the team needs it.

By month 6 the operating system is running and measured; by month 12 it is measurably better.

When

What's true

First 90 days

You've met the team and key partners, baselined how work moves today (turnaround time, cost per asset, throughput), and presented an operating vision and roadmap approved by the VP of Creative and the CMO.

By 6 months

One intake and prioritization system runs across performance, brand, social and creator work. Baseline metrics are reported monthly. The flex model is live, with a tiered bench, rate cards and a playbook for scaling up and down. Two or three AI pilots are running with measured savings. A production forecast is built with FP&A. The quality bar for A/V and creator output is defined, with a recommendation on converting the contract producer to full-time.

By 12 months

Turnaround time, cost per asset and on-time delivery have improved against the 6-month baselines. Output has grown across formats and a major brand campaign has been produced through the system, without proportional headcount. Successful AI pilots are default workflows. A year-two team plan with business cases is in place, with growth paths for the team. Operations run without escalation to the VP of Creative.

We'd rather you meet these four fully than half-meet twelve.

• You've built and led a small creative ops or production team. 10 to 15 years in creative operations, production or studio at an in-house brand team, studio, agency or media company, including 3+ years leading people. You've developed the people on your teams and watched them grow into bigger roles.
• You thrive in evolving, high-growth environments. You've set an operating vision where none existed, earned buy-in from senior leaders, and can show measurable results. Ambiguity energizes you.
• You're ops-first and production-literate. You've managed producers and ops managers, owned production budgets, and worked with vendors and freelancers. You know which problems are operational and which need a producer's craft.
• You've shipped AI into creative workflows. You can show what changed (speed, capacity, cost or quality), and you have a clear view of what to automate and where human judgment is essential.

• Experience with creator or UGC programs, especially part-time or contract models
• Experience with video and short-form social production
• Experience managing rights, likeness and usage exposure for creator and AI-generated content
• Background in live entertainment, sports, ticketing, marketplaces or consumer tech
• Hands-on experience with Asana and Dropbox, or similar systems

This is a new leadership layer, so there's no playbook to inherit. Most of our baselines (turnaround, cost per asset, throughput) don't exist yet, which means you'll build measurement before you can improve anything.

The team is small and strong, and we won't be adding headcount quickly. You'll scale through leverage (AI, a flexible bench, better systems) and earn conversions and new roles with real business cases. Our marketing org is evolving and priorities will shift; you'll need to hold a clear point of view while adapting.

The role is remote and hands-on. Some weeks you'll be setting strategy, and others you'll be in the details with the team. If that sounds energizing rather than frustrating, you'll like it here.