Associate Director, Observability Engineering

Every day, millions of Australians connect, work, stream, and stay in touch on the Optus network. When it works seamlessly, it's easy to take for granted. But behind it is a team making thousands of decisions every day - decisions that keep people, businesses and communities connected.

Right now, Optus is passionate about getting the fundamentals right - simplifying how we work, lifting standards, and building a more reliable, resilient experience for our customers. It's not about surface-level change. It's about how we make decisions, how we work together, and how we deliver.

The AD, Observability Engineering leads the strategy, standards and delivery of enterprise observability capabilities, providing trusted end-to-end visibility across network services, platforms and infrastructure to support proactive, AI-driven Network Operations. The role ensures high-quality telemetry and operational insights are scalable, service-aware and integrated across the business, improving early issue detection, network resilience and customer outcomes.

What You’ll Do 

• Own and drive the observability strategy, roadmap and capability maturity across network, application, platform and customer service domains.
• Lead the engineering of telemetry capabilities, including metrics, logs, events, traces and network operational signals, supported by common standards and instrumentation practices.
• Enable service-aware observability by integrating telemetry across network, OSS, cloud and service platforms, providing trusted insights for analytics, AI and automation.
• Establish observability standards, data quality controls and governance to ensure telemetry is reliable, secure and fit for operational decision-making.
• Drive the adoption and optimisation of observability capabilities, improving telemetry coverage, data quality, operational visibility and cost efficiency.
• Lead cross-functional stakeholder engagement and strategic technology partnerships to advance service-centric and AI-driven operations.
• Build and develop a high-performing observability engineering team while fostering a culture of engineering excellence, accountability and continuous improvement.

What You’ll Bring 

Extensive leadership experience across telecommunications, Network Operations, observability, service assurance, OSS or large-scale technology environments.

• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise-scale observability, monitoring, telemetry engineering or operational transformation capabilities.

• Strong knowledge of modern observability practices across metrics, logs, events and traces, including telemetry pipelines, instrumentation, event collection and service-aware monitoring.

• Strong understanding of network operations, service assurance, operational data, topology, analytics and the role of observability in AI-driven and automated operations.

• Proven ability to define capability strategy, engineering standards and roadmaps and translate them into measurable operational outcomes.

• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-domain teams and influence senior stakeholders across Operations, Engineering, OSS, Architecture and Technology.

• Strong commercial, financial and vendor management capability, including investment prioritisation, platform rationalisation and value realisation.

• Excellent strategic thinking, communication and executive stakeholder engagement skills

The good stuff … 

• Competitive remuneration and employee discounts. Make life easier (and more affordable) with $80 monthly credit and 25% off Optus products and unique shopping discounts with our retail partners. 

• Flexible working arrangements with opportunities to work three days in the office, two days remote or home. 

• Competitive leave policies, including additional 'Connected’ days to focus on culture, family, health, community, or whatever’s important to you. 

• We support growing families with inclusive, carer-neutral paid Parental Leave of up to 16 weeks. 

• Direct your own development and build future-ready skills with Optus U’s industry-focused micro-credentials, developed with La Trobe and Macquarie Universities. 

• Build meaningful connections through employee-led networks and diversity initiatives including Culture Connect, Elevate Women, Disability Network and Express Yourself (LGBTQIA+). 

• Put your wellbeing first with free access to counselling and support services, 24/7 — in-person, by phone, SMS, or video. 

At Optus, we are strengthened by others and that means valuing diversity and saying ‘yes’ to embracing individual differences. We are committed to ensuring that our application process provides an equal employment opportunity to all job seekers, including individuals from diverse gender, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, individuals with a disability, individuals identifying as being part of the LGBTQIA+ community, individuals who may have served in the armed forces or who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. 

We also want to do our best to make our recruitment process inclusive. If you require any adjustments or accessibility support, please email AccessibleRecruitment@optus.com.au or call 1800 309 170. We’re here to help. When you contact us, please advise your preferred method of contact and we will be in touch within 48 hours. For more information on Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Optus, please visit https://www.optus.com.au/about/inclusion-diversity.