Senior Business Innovation Manager in Sydney

We are looking for a Sr. Manager, Business Innovation to join Align's New Business Models & Services team in APAC. This is neither a sales role nor a pure strategy role. It’s a “build-and-execute” position for someone who wants to create with urgency, can influence without authority, and gets things done without a detailed brief. Fintech fluency is a must.

Location: ANZ: Sydney

Travel: Estimated 30-40%

Key Responsibilities

• Embed yourself with the commercial team.
• Build trusted relationships.
• Become the person local leadership calls when they want to think about a problem differently.
• Run structured discovery to surface growth blockers.
• Understand existing innovation programs & priorities and figure out what they need to look like in ANZ.
• Build business cases, develop business plans, and evaluate new business opportunities for investment by the organization.
• Design and run pilots. Iterate fast. Know when to kill something and when to double down.
• Execute with urgency.
• Turn validated ideas into live programs, working across internal teams and external partners to make sure what gets built gets adopted.
• Source, evaluate and manage third-party partners. Negotiate agreements. Own the relationships.
• Develop the internal materials (playbooks, training, commercial enablement) that will allow the local teams to adopt and deploy what’s been proven.
• Feed learnings back into the global innovation team so that what works in one market can be adapted and scaled elsewhere.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

• Strong business acumen, judgment, and maturity: you think naturally in terms of unit economics, incentive structures, and value exchange, not just features and benefits.
• Meaningful fintech experience: at least 3 years of hands‑on experience in consumer lending, BNPL, payments, healthcare financing, or adjacent fintech domains.
• Experience with iterative product or solution design: You know how to run a structured pilot, what good validation looks like, and how to make go/no‑go decisions based on imperfect information.
• Ability to context‑switch easily: One week you're deep in a fintech partnership negotiation, the next you're thinking of systems integrations or designing new revenue models.
• Soft power and collaboration skills: You have a track record of getting things done through your credibility, your relationships, and your ability to make people want to work with you.
• Comfort with ambiguity and independent working: This team is small, and the mandate is broad. You need to be able to prioritize and create structure where there isn't any.
• Affinity for AI: you use AI tools as a practical part of how you work: research, analysis, synthesis and building materials.
• Strong project management, organizational, and analytical skills: Ability to manage budget, resources and multiple workstreams simultaneously.

Education And/Or Experience

• 10+ years of commercial / product management / consulting experience, of which at least 3 years in fintech, with a track record of building or scaling something (a product, a program, a market), not just executing a playbook.
• Bachelor's degree minimum; MBA or equivalent a plus but not required if the experience speaks for itself.

Nice to Have

• Experience in medtech, healthtech or any other regulated industry, in particular working within or alongside a DSO or multi‑site dental or healthcare group.
• SaaS, platform or API product management experience, particularly relevant for systems integration work.
• Experience working in an overlay or matrix organization where influence without authority is the primary operating model.