Associate Director, AI Product

Associate Director, AI Product — Optus.ai

Help build the AI capability that will power the future of Optus

Optus is an Australian telecommunications company, delivering more than 11 million services to our customers every day across mobile, broadband and digital solutions.

Every day, millions of Australians connect, work, stream and stay in touch on the Optus network. Behind that experience is a team making critical decisions that keep people, businesses and communities connected.

Optus.ai builds and runs the AI platforms that help Optus scale AI safely. We create reusable capabilities, set guardrails for responsible adoption, and partner with business teams to identify opportunities, shape roadmaps, prototype solutions and turn ideas into products that deliver value. This includes building agentic workflow automation, conversational analytics, copilots and decision-support tools that improve customer outcomes, employee effectiveness and operational performance.

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on product leader to join the Optus.ai team as Associate Director, AI Product. This role sits at the intersection of AI Product & Platform Development and Enablement. You will help the business understand where AI can make a meaningful difference, then lead the journey from problem definition through to prototype, product development, launch, adoption and optimisation.

What you’ll do

Lead AI Internal Engagements

• Partner with business leaders and teams to understand their goals, customer needs, operational challenges and constraints.
• Facilitate workshops, interviews and demos that build shared understanding.

Discover, prototype and validate

• Identify and translate business problems into AI product opportunities, hypotheses and experiments.
• Rapidly prototype solutions using no-code, low-code and coded approaches to test desirability, feasibility and value.

Define and deliver AI products

• Develop product vision, strategy, roadmap and measurable outcomes for AI products and capabilities.
• Develop clear product requirements, user stories, process flows, acceptance criteria and success measures that engineering, data science and platform teams can act on.

Work across product, internal go-to-market and platform

• Work with platform product and engineering teams to identify reusable capabilities, integration needs, data requirements and platform improvements.
• Monitor adoption, engagement, quality, cost and business impact, using insights to improve the product and inform future investment.

Build responsibly and at scale

• Champion responsible AI, ensuring products are designed with appropriate controls for privacy, security, safety, risk and compliance.
• Help establish repeatable patterns, playbooks and practices that allow AI products to scale safely across Optus.

What we’re looking for

You are a commercially minded, technically credible product leader who can create clarity in ambiguous environments and turn AI potential into products people use.

You’ll bring

• Experience leading product strategy and delivery in a complex, enterprise or highly regulated environment.
• A strong track record of leading engagements with senior stakeholders: understanding problems, aligning teams, making decisions and creating momentum.
• Hands-on experience exploring AI use cases through no-code, low-code and/or coded prototypes. You do not need to be a machine learning engineer, but you do need to understand how modern AI solutions are put together and be able to work credibly with technical teams.
• Strong product discovery skills, including customer and user research, journey analysis, experimentation and value validation.
• An understanding of AI risk, privacy, security, governance, data and model limitations, with the judgement to balance innovation and responsible delivery.
• Excellent communication, facilitation and influencing skills, with the ability to engage confidently with executives, business teams and technical specialists.

You may also have

• Experience with enterprise AI platforms, copilots, agents and workflow automation,
• Experience working with APIs, data flows, cloud services, prompt design, evaluation approaches or AI application patterns.

The good stuff

• Competitive remuneration, plus $80 monthly credit, 25% off Optus products and exclusive shopping discounts with our retail partners—making everyday life a little more affordable.
• Genuine flexibility: work three days in the office and two days from wherever works best for you.
• An office campus with cafés, chill-out zones, a GP, post office, gym and on-site childcare centre. It’s designed for real life.
• Great leave policies, including additional Connected days to focus on culture, family, health, community or whatever matters most to you.
• Inclusive, carer-neutral paid parental leave of up to 16 weeks, because family comes first.
• Build meaningful connections through employee-led networks and diversity initiatives, including Culture Connect, Elevate Women, Disability Network and Express Yourself (LGBTQIA+).
• Free counselling and support services, available 24/7 in person, by phone, SMS or video.
• A free Optus bus from Macquarie University Metro Station every 6–8 minutes in the morning and afternoon, plus on-site parking. Plus, end-of-trip facilities with lockers, showers, irons and hair dryers.

Diversity, inclusion and accessibility

At Optus, we are strengthened by others. We value diversity and say yes to embracing individual differences. We are committed to ensuring that our application process provides equal employment opportunity to all job seekers, including people from diverse gender, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, people with disability, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, people who may have served in the armed forces, and people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander.

We want to make our recruitment process inclusive. If you require any adjustments or accessibility support to participate fairly and equitably in the recruitment process, please email accessiblerecruitment@optus.com.au or call 1800 309 170.

For more information on Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Optus, visit Optus Inclusion and Diversity.