Associate Director, Orchestration & Autonomous Automation

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, Orchestration & Autonomous Operations leads the development of cross-domain orchestration, closed-loop control and autonomous operational capabilities that enable systems, workflows and AI to coordinate end-to-end execution across Network Operations. The role is responsible for ensuring operational intelligence is translated into safe, governed and measurable actions, driving faster service restoration, reduced operational complexity and improved resilience while maintaining appropriate human oversight and accountability.

What You’ll Do 

• Own and drive the orchestration, closed-loop operations and autonomous operations strategy, roadmap and capability maturity across Network Operations.
• Lead the engineering and industrialisation of scalable orchestration services, event-driven workflows and cross-domain execution capabilities.
• Develop closed-loop operational workflows that integrate detection, decision-making, execution, validation and continuous learning.
• Establish governance, control mechanisms, decision policies and execution guardrails to ensure safe, auditable and accountable autonomous operations.
• Measure and optimise orchestration performance through improved automation adoption, MTTR reduction, service resilience, operational efficiency and cost effectiveness.
• Lead cross-functional stakeholders, strategic partners and specialist teams while fostering engineering excellence, innovation and the safe progression towards autonomous operations.

What You’ll Bring 

• Extensive leadership experience across telecommunications, Network Operations, orchestration, automation engineering, OSS or large-scale technology environments.

• Demonstrated experience leading complex orchestration, closed-loop automation, workflow or autonomous operations capabilities across distributed operational environments.

• Strong knowledge of orchestration, event-driven architectures, workflow engines, APIs, automation platforms, AI-assisted decisioning and control-loop concepts.

• Strong understanding of operational risk, production assurance, resilience, observability, security and governance for autonomous or highly automated systems.

• Proven ability to define capability strategy, autonomy maturity pathways, 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, Architecture, Security and Technology.

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

• Excellent strategic thinking, communication and executive stakeholder engagement skills.

• Relevant tertiary qualifications in Engineering, Telecommunications, Computer Science, Technology or equivalent significant industry experience.

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.