Operations Manager - Processes & Automation (m/w/d)

What we’re buildingmelu kids wants to be the fastest-moving company in personalized products. Today that’s name labels, stickers and stamps for kids, sold across Europe and the US, printed and shipped same day from our own production.Every niche we add runs through the same production floor. The faster and tighter our operations, the faster we grow. That’s the job.The problem we’re hiring you forEvery order is unique. In the back-to-school weeks that’s thousands of individual orders a day. That only works if the processes behind it are tight. Ours are good, not great. Some things still run on habit, some on spreadsheets, some on one person knowing how it’s done. You fix that.What you’ll actually doYou report to our Head of Operations and work alongside our Production Lead and our in-house developer. You own processes and projects.Projects already on the table:Make customer support AI-first. You design and build the automation that answers most of them without a human, and makes sure the rest reaches one fast.Map and streamline how materials and orders flow through production, from incoming goods to shipping, and automate wherever it pays off.Build the production reporting we don’t have yet: orders per hour, error rates, cost per unit, in a form that holds up when machines or processes change.Make inventory management work end to end with our Production Lead.Integrate new products into production, together with our Product Manager.Drive internal tooling forward with our developer: scanning app, production dashboards, whatever removes the most friction next.Beyond the projects, you keep day-to-day operations aligned across teams. When our Head of Operations is out, you’re the first point of contact for the team and the founders on anything operational. The Production Lead runs the floor, the founders back your decisions, you keep the machine running and improving.Who thrives hereInefficiency bothers you, and you can’t leave it alone.At least 2 years in operations, supply chain, process improvement or e-commerce, and you’ve already fixed or automated something nobody asked you to.You’ve used AI tools to solve a real work problem, not just to write an email. n8n, Make, Zapier, Claude Code, a bit of Python: we don’t care which, we care that you ship.You launch at 80% and improve from there, rather than polishing for weeks.You’d rather spend an afternoon on the production floor understanding why something breaks than write a slide about it.Organised enough to keep five threads running, direct enough to say when one of them is stuck.Fluent in English, our working language. German is a big plus: many of our suppliers, carriers and service providers work in German, and you’ll deal with them regularly.Who won’t enjoy itIf you want a 12-month roadmap that doesn’t change, this isn’t it. We move fast and change direction when the evidence does. July to September is intense; the rest of the year is where you make the next one easier. Operations here is physical, with machines, cardboard and real people, so you’ll be on-site most days. And in a team this size there’s no department to hide in: everyone does some unglamorous work.What we offer€50,000–€65,000, depending on experience.Ownership from week one. Your projects, your decisions, your results on the dashboard.Growth that means scope, not titles: more projects, more budget, more autonomy, and pay that follows.Founders and a Head of Operations who use the same tools you do and say yes to a working prototype faster than to a proposal.Flexible hours, mostly on-site in Berlin (3–4 days), remote when the work allows.How we hireThree weeks from application to decision, if it fits on both sides. A 30-minute call with our Head of Operations. A 60-minute conversation with him and one of the founders, where we give you a real process problem of ours to think through. Half a day on-site in Berlin to see the production and meet the team. Then an offer.ApplySend your CV and three sentences about something you fixed or automated: what was broken, what you did, what changed. Use whatever tools you want to write it, we do too. No cover letter.