Operate Lead

Job Requisition ID: 41472 

• Flexible work arrangements - work in a way that suits you best
• World-class learning and leadership programs
• Salary packaging - to suit your personal and financial circumstances  

The Operate Lead owns the 24/7 Operate function for Optimal Reality. You are accountable for the health of every live client instance, for the engineering team that keeps them running, and for the architectural decisions that determine how reliably and securely the platform performs in production. This is a hands-on leadership role: you set the operational standard, you are the senior point of contact and escalation for our clients, and you drive the shift toward AI-augmented operations — where agents take on toil such as CVE triage and remediation so the team can focus on the hard problems. You sit at the intersection of engineering, client relationships and commercial outcomes. 

What will your typical day look like?

You will own the operational reliability of a platform that clients use to run real networks — transport systems, energy grids, supply chains — where downtime has real consequences. You will build the team, set the architecture, and define what AI-augmented operations look like in a high-stakes environment. The standard you set determines how confidently every client can depend on Optimal Reality. 

Lead the Operate team

• Lead and grow the 24/7 Operate team across shift and on-call coverage — setting roster structure, escalation paths, and the standards that keep live instances stable out of hours
• Own team performance, capability development and wellbeing; coach engineers, run hiring and onboarding, and build a sustainable on-call culture that doesn’t burn people out
• Set and enforce operational standards — SLAs/SLOs, runbooks, incident management, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement of the way the team operates

Own the operational architecture

• Be the senior technical authority for production OR instances — making and defending architectural decisions on reliability, observability, scaling, security and cost
• Own monitoring, alerting and observability across back-end services, data pipelines and operator interfaces so issues are caught before clients feel them
• Drive architectural hardening and technical debt reduction informed by what the team learns in live operation, feeding improvements back to the OR product team

Drive AI-augmented operations

• Design and deploy agentic workflows that automate operational toils for example, agents that triage, prioritise and resolve CVEs, propose and test patches, and raise validated remediation pull requests for human review
• Introduce AI-assisted incident response, log analysis, and root-cause investigation, with appropriate guardrails, evaluation and human-in-the-loop controls for high-stakes changes
• Set the governance for safe automation: what agents are trusted to do unattended, what requires approval, and how every automated action is logged and auditable

Manage client relationships and escalations

• Act as the senior point of contact for clients on all operational matters — owning the relationship, the operational roadmap, and the trust that comes with running mission-critical systems
• Lead major-incident communications and executive-level escalations with clarity and composure, and own the follow-through to resolution 
• Partner with delivery and commercial leads to scope operate engagements, shape contracts and SLAs, and ensure new client projects have a sound operations plan from the outset

About the team  

Our Australian team draws on hands-on industry expertise and extensive experience from some of the world's largest operations and asset intensive projects. The team enables clients to set up, build and run projects with greater confidence in the results. We bring our clients this confidence through our focussed offerings, driving improved performance across transformation and operations through the application of digital technologies, business intelligence and analytics and support to project development, delivery, commissioning, operations and management.

Enough about us, let’s talk about you.

• 10+ years in software engineering or platform/production operations, including significant experience leading 24/7 or mission-critical operations teams
• Proven people leadership — you have built, grown and retained high-performing engineering or SRE/operations teams, and managed on-call sustainably
• Deep production architecture judgement: reliability, observability, security, scaling and cost across distributed, microservices-based systems
• Strong hands-on background with cloud (AWS preferred), containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and CI/CD
• Practical experience applying LLM-based tooling and agent patterns to real engineering work — prompt design, tool use, and human-in-the-loop automation — with a clear view of where to trust automation and where not to
• Strong grasp of security operations and vulnerability management, including CVE triage and remediation workflows
• Exceptional client presence: you can own a tense escalation, brief executives, and turn operational performance into commercial trust
• Operates with ownership — you finish things, flag problems early, and set the standard for the team

Nice to Have

• Experience with time-series, telemetry or streaming data at scale — IoT, sensor networks, SCADA or similar
• Familiarity with the OR stack or comparable: Golang, Julia, Python, GraphQL, React, DeckGL
• Experience building or governing agent evaluation, red-teaming or adversarial testing frameworks
• Experience building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers or tool integrations for LLM agents
• Security clearance or eligibility, or prior work in defence, utilities or critical infrastructure environments

Why Deloitte?  

At Deloitte, we focus our energy on interesting and impactful work. We’re always learning, innovating and setting the standard; making a positive difference to our clients and our society. We put coaching at the heart of what we do, helping our people grow their careers in any direction – whether it be up, moving into something new, or even moving across the world.   
  
We embrace diversity, equity and inclusion. We have a diverse collection of people from different backgrounds, with different experiences, gender identities, abilities and thinking styles. What binds us together is a shared commitment to value everyone’s perspective and to cultivate inclusion; so that our work environment is a safe space we can all belong.  
   
We prioritise flexibility and choice. At Deloitte, you get trust on Day 1. We know our people get their best work done when they’re in control of where and how they work, designing their work week around their client, team and personal commitments. 
  
We help you live and work well. To support your personal and professional life, we offer a range of perks and benefits, including retail discounts, wellbeing leave, paid volunteering days, twelve flexible working options, market-leading parental leave and return to work support package.  

 
Next Steps 

Sound like the sort of role for you? Apply now, we’d love to hear from you!  

By applying for this job, you’ll be assessed against the Deloitte Talent Standards. We’ve designed these standards so that you can grow in your career, and we can provide our clients with a consistent and exceptional Deloitte employee experience globally. The preferred candidate will be subject to background screening by Deloitte or by their external third-party provider.