Product & Operations Lead

Trace; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Hybrid work flexibility

AI tooling access

Regular founder time

Growth potential

Job summary

Trace in Sydney is seeking a builder who combines product and operations to ship impactful work. You will partner with the CPO to scope priorities, then work with engineers to deliver, while also removing friction across teams using AI and automation.

You will sit at the intersection of product, engineering and consulting, building scalable processes, dashboards, and AI-driven workflows to save hours and improve utilization. This role blends strategy with hands-on delivery in a hybrid setup.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in product, operations, or a similar startup/scale-up role, owning end-to-end outcomes.
• Clear understanding of scope, prioritisation and trade-offs; formal title is a bonus.
• Experience working with engineers and writing actionable requirements.
• Comfort with numbers, spreadsheets and data to inform decisions.

Responsibilities

• Product: set priorities with CPO; define scope; translate ideas into clear, well-scoped requirements for engineers.
• Coordinate with engineering to ship important work and keep stakeholders informed of changes.
• Differentiate recurring needs from one-off client requests and standardise the former.
• Track shipped work and measure impact like adoption and time saved.
• Operations: identify manual work and remove it with AI agents, automation, and better processes.
• Run capacity planning for the consulting team and plan for peak periods.
• Improve handoff between teams (sales, onboarding, delivery, support).
• Protect project scope with clear sign-off rules for extra work.
• Build dashboards and metrics to monitor team performance and cadence of reviews.
• Create AI-driven training and documentation to accelerate new starters.
• AI focus: understand what AI can do today; measure changes; ensure automation is used.
• As a person: climate-focused, fast-moving, direct communicator, and proactive in reducing friction.

Skills

Product management

Operations

Business operations

Startup experience

Requirements writing

Data fluency

AI tooling

Tools

Python basics

SQL

APIs

Job description

We're looking for someone who loves making a fast-moving team work better. Half of this role is product: working with our CPO to decide what matters, scoping it properly and getting it shipped with our engineers. The other half is operations: finding the friction in how we work, within teams and between them, and removing it. AI runs through all of it.

This is a builder role. You won't be writing strategy decks about efficiency; you'll be the person who makes it happen and can show us the hours saved.

Highlights

• A rare mix of product and operations in one role, with real ownership of both
• Our engineering and customer success teams are using AI to power what they do; your job is to prioritise what they work on and build the systems to create truly agentic operations
• Work closely with the founders and see how the company is run: strategy, product, pricing, the lot
• Package includes salary + stock options
• Sydney hybrid. We ask everyone to come into the office two days a week
• Work with purpose: help Australian businesses understand and act on climate risk, not just talk about it

About Trace

Australia's largest companies now have to report their climate risk and emissions under the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS), to a standard their auditors will sign off on. Most of them are not ready.

Trace exists to make that possible. We combine AI-powered technology with expert consulting so businesses can produce audit-ready climate disclosures without hiring an army of consultants.

We're a VC-backed Australian climate tech company, and we're growing faster than at any point in our history. Our consulting revenue has grown six-fold in the last year, and the regulation only gets broader from here.

Why this role exists

We're a software and services business. That means our product, engineering and consulting teams are tightly linked, and when one moves faster than the others, things fall through the gaps. AI has made our engineers far more productive, which is great, and it means the bottleneck is now scoping the right work and getting clear requirements to them quickly.

At the same time, our consulting team does a lot of skilled manual work that software and AI agents could take on: reviewing inventories, checking data before it's submitted, handling uploads, rebuilding templates. Every hour we take off them is an hour back for clients.

You'll sit in the middle of all of this and make it run better.

Your responsibilities

Product

• Work with our CPO to set priorities and define scope, so we're clear on what gets built, what doesn't, and why
• Turn loose ideas from clients, consultants and the founders into clear, well-scoped requirements that engineers can run with
• Coordinate with engineering to get the important work shipped, and keep the rest of the business informed when priorities or requirements change
• Tell the difference between a recurring product need and a one-off client request, and help us standardise the first and say no to the second
• Track what we ship and whether it made a difference: adoption, time saved, fewer support requests

Operations

• Work across the business to find manual, repetitive work, and remove it with AI agents, automation and better process
• Run capacity planning for our consulting team, so we can see who's working on what and plan ahead for reporting season peaks
• Improve how teams hand work to each other, from sales to onboarding to delivery to support
• Help us protect scope on client projects, with clear rules for when extra work needs sign-off
• Build the dashboards and metrics that show how each team is performing, and the rhythm of reviews that keeps us on track
• Create AI-driven training and documentation so new starters get up to speed fast and knowledge doesn't live in one person's head

AI, across everything

• Be the person in the business who knows what AI can and can't do today, and puts it to work
• Measure every change before and after. If we can't measure it, we don't count it
• Make sure what you build gets used. An automation nobody uses doesn't help anyone

What we'll love about you

Product and operations

• 4+ years in product, operations, business operations, consulting or a similar role in a startup or scale-up, with a track record of things you owned end to end
• You understand scope, prioritisation and trade-offs. A formal product title is a bonus, not a requirement
• You've worked closely with engineers and can write requirements they're glad to receive
• You're comfortable with numbers, spreadsheets and data, and you use them to make decisions
• You've worked in, or alongside, a services or consulting business and understand utilisation, capacity and margin

With AI

• You use AI tools every day and you're doing this now, not open to trying it
• You've built something that saved real time: an automation, an agent, a workflow, a custom GPT or skill, a no-code integration
• You have good judgement about what to hand to AI, what to check closely, and where a simple, reliable process is the better answer
• Bonus: you can script a little (Python, SQL, APIs) or you're keen to learn

As a person

• You care about the climate problem. You don't need to be a technical expert, but you should want to learn
• You move fast, you're curious and you'd rather ship something useful and improve it than wait for perfect
• Direct, low-ego and a clear communicator, in writing and in person. You can say no to a request without upsetting anyone
• You notice friction other people have stopped seeing, and you can't leave it alone
• You work visibly: you share what you're doing, flag problems early and follow through
• You enjoy balancing deep work with getting to know your colleagues and having a laugh along the way

What you'll get from us

• Competitive salary + stock options
• Flexible, hybrid working
• Frontier AI tooling, paid for, and the freedom to bring your own workflow
• Regular time with the founders and exposure to how the company is run: strategy, capital raising, product, the lot
• Excellent culture. The founders have been friends for over a decade and care a lot about building a company people want to work at
• A role you can grow into as we scale

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