Associate Director Engineering Controls Assurance

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

Are you passionate about ensuring engineering controls are robust, effective, and auditable? We're looking for an experienced Associate Director - Controls (Audit & Assurance) to provide independent assurance across our technology landscape. This role is focused on verifying—not designing or operating—controls, and ensuring there's clear, defensible evidence of their effectiveness.

You'll be the independent voice that validates our controls using real-time pipeline evidence—not static PDFs—demonstrating that they work as intended. Working across platform and product services, you'll assess control design and operation, manage risk acceptance processes, and deliver audit-ready reporting that supports executive and regulatory oversight.

The day to day

• Maintain and manage the control library, mapping policy frameworks (ISO, CIS, regulatory, SOCI/ACMA) to tests and pipeline evidence.
• Plan and execute assurance reviews to validate control effectiveness and separation of duties.
• Lead the risk acceptance and exception management process, ensuring decisions are tracked with expiry and mitigation plans.
• Produce audit-ready evidence packages using pipeline data to reduce manual effort.
• Deliver quarterly assurance reports to the ELT and Board, highlighting residual risk and systemic gaps.
• Ensure independence from control design and operation, aligning with Internal Audit and governance teams.
• Collaborate with engineering teams while maintaining firm adherence to standards.
• Support audit readiness and reduce manual lift across assurance cycles.

What you'll bring

• Strong background in IT audit, assurance, or security engineering within software/platform environments.
• Expertise in control testing, sampling, and evidence gathering from CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, SBOM/SARIF/SLSA attestations, OPA/gate results, etc..)
• Experience working in regulated or critical infrastructure environments.
• Clear and concise executive-level writing and presentation skills.
• Confidence presenting to senior leadership and external auditors.
• Independence in judgment and ability to deliver defensible assurance opinions.
• Evidence-first mindset—prefers logs and artifacts over narrative.
• Pragmatic risk literacy with disciplined expiry and mitigation tracking.

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.
• Vibrant and collaborative office campus that includes cafes, convenience store, chill out zones, GP, post office, gym and on-site childcare centre.
• 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.
• Free Optus bus from Macquarie University Metro Station (every 6-8 minutes); morning and afternoon.

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 to participate fairly and equitably in the recruitment process, please email or call 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