Senior Consultant - AI-Enabled Marketing Transformation

Who We Are

Optima Partners is a forward-thinking professional services firm on an exciting growth trajectory. As we continue to scale, we are strengthening our Customer Engagement & Strategy team with people who can help leading organisations modernise how marketing, content, customer and technology teams work.

We work with major consumer and enterprise brands to tackle complex business and customer challenges, driving transformation and championing customer-centric agendas. Our work combines practical strategy, data, technology, AI design and delivery to turn ambition into measurable outcomes.

There will never be a typical day at Optima Partners. You will join a collaborative, fast-growing team helping clients make marketing, content, service and operating model transformation work in practice.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Consultant – Marketing Operations & Transformation who can help clients rethink and improve how marketing, content and customer engagement work gets done.

The role sits at the intersection of marketing operations, operational transformation and service design, helping clients understand how their organisations work today, identify where change will create the greatest value, and design and implement better ways of working. This means looking holistically across people, process, technology and data, as well as the governance, partners and capabilities that connect them.

You will help clients move from diagnosis through design to implementation; understanding operational challenges, designing future-state services and operating models, testing new approaches and translating them into practical, scalable change. Increasingly, this will include helping clients understand how AI, automation and emerging technologies can reshape marketing operations, and where they can create genuine operational value.

In the role, you will:

- Assess marketing and content operating environments to understand processes, roles, capabilities, technology, data, governance, hand-offs, partner models and pain points.

- Identify and prioritise opportunities for operational improvement and transformation, considering the impact across people, process, technology and data.

- Design future-state operating models, services and ways of working, covering capabilities, accountabilities, governance, interaction models and organisational change.

- Apply service design methods including research, journey and process mapping, service blueprinting and problem framing to ensure transformation is grounded in how people actually work.

- Redesign marketing workflows across areas such as planning, briefing, content and creative development, approvals, activation, measurement and optimisation.

- Explore how MarTech, data, automation, AI and emerging technologies can enable better ways of working and translate new capabilities into practical operational change.

- Shape and run pilots, proofs of concept and structured experiments to test new approaches, demonstrate value and inform broader transformation.

- Develop practical transformation artefacts including process maps, service blueprints, operating model designs, RACI models, role definitions, governance models and implementation roadmaps.

- Bring together stakeholders across marketing, business, technology, data, design, risk and partner organisations, facilitating workshops and building alignment around change.

- Define measures that demonstrate the impact of transformation, such as cycle time, throughput, rework, adoption, cost, quality, compliance and productivity.

What We Are Looking For

You are an experienced transformation professional with a strong understanding of marketing operations and how modern marketing organisations work end-to-end. You understand how people, processes, technology, data, governance and partners come together to deliver marketing outcomes, and can identify opportunities to make that environment simpler, faster and more effective.

You bring strong service design thinking to operational challenges, using human-centred methods to understand how work really happens and translate insight into practical change. You are comfortable moving from diagnosis and design through to implementation in complex, cross-functional environments.

- 7+ years’ relevant professional experience, with significant track record in marketing operational improvement and transformation, and a strong understanding of how marketing organisations, their capabilities and wider ecosystems work.

- Demonstrable experience diagnosing and improving operations across people, process, technology and data, identifying root causes and translating them into practical improvement or transformation opportunities.

- Strong service design capability, including stakeholder and user research, service blueprinting, journey and process mapping, problem framing and translating human needs into improved ways of working.

- Experience designing and improving operating models, processes, governance, roles and responsibilities, ways of working and agency/partner models.

- Experience across the end-to-end marketing lifecycle, including areas such as planning, briefing, content and creative development, approvals, activation, measurement and optimisation.

- Strong consulting skills, including structuring ambiguous problems, facilitating workshops, conducting stakeholder interviews, synthesising insight and developing clear recommendations.

- Experience working within a management consulting environment, ideally delivering operational improvement, transformation or operating model engagements for complex organisations.

- Well versed in how MarTech, workflow platforms, automation, data and emerging technologies such as AI can enable operational improvement, without needing to be a technical implementation specialist.

- Experience working across multidisciplinary marketing, business, technology, data, design and change teams to take ideas from diagnosis through design and into implementation.

- Excellent visual communication, process mapping, written communication and presentation skills, with the ability to make complex operating environments understandable.

- Financial services familiarity and an appreciation of how governance, risk and controls influence operational design.

- A practical, delivery-oriented mindset, comfortable working with ambiguity and focused on turning transformation thinking into tangible operational change.

What We Offer

- The opportunity to help leading organisations make AI, MarTech and operating model transformation real in the business.

- Exposure to emerging agentic systems, AI-driven workflows and structured experimentation.

- A role focused on execution and impact, not just artefacts or conceptual frameworks.

- The chance to shape PoCs, labs, service design patterns and repeatable consulting assets.

- Close collaboration with strategy, transformation, technology, data science, engineering and change specialists.

- Ownership of meaningful workstreams from discovery through design, validation and activation planning.

- The ability to build reusable operating model assets, service blueprints, process libraries, templates and playbooks.

- A collaborative, fast-growing consulting environment where ambiguity, experimentation and practical problem-solving are valued.

- Opportunities to present to stakeholders, manage teams, shape recommendations and connect service redesign to broader transformation outcomes.

- A platform to contribute to Optima’s growth while developing deep expertise in AI-enabled marketing, content and service operating models.

What We Offer

- Competitive salary + bonus up to 15%

- 37 days holiday (incl. Christmas shutdown)

- Private medical insurance, life & income protection

- Pension scheme

- 1,000+ employee perks

- Dedicated learning, training, and certification support