GrowthOps Asia Hiring! Full Time Associate Director, SEO - GEO (Technical) in Federal Territory - Ricebowl

Welcome to GO Asia

GrowthOps is a marketing transformation agency, consistently awarded the top Customer Engagement agency in APAC. For over 15 years, we’ve been helping brands go to market in Asia by integrating strategy, design, technology and AI. Trusted by enterprises and high-growth innovators, we specialise in supporting media, MarTech and creative operations across financial services, telecommunications, transportation, ecommerce, energy and more. GrowthOps is part of The Applied AI Company.

Overview

We are looking for an Associate Director to own technical search as a single practice across our regional client portfolio: classic organic search and generative engine optimisation (GEO), treated as one discipline rather than two workstreams that meet at the reporting stage.

This is not a larger version of a specialist role. You will set the standards other people deliver against, carry commercial accountability for the search workstream across accounts, lead the manager and specialist layer, and represent the practice in new business. You will also stay hands-on where it counts: log file analysis, data work, and the client deck itself are yours, not delegated.

You will report to the Head of SEO & Analytics and work alongside content, analytics, strategy, creative and technology leads on enterprise accounts across Singapore, Malaysia and the wider ASEAN region. Several of these clients operate in regulated or high-governance categories, so judgement and documentation discipline matter as much as technical depth.

Responsibilities

Practice leadership

• Own the technical standard across the agency for both SEO and GEO: audit methodology, deliverable templates, QA gates and a clear definition of done on every engagement.
• Build reusable IP: automated checks, log pipelines, monitoring, schema libraries, prompt sets, migration playbooks and deck frameworks that the team can scale and sell.
• Act as the final technical authority. Arbitrate disputes with client engineering and platform vendors, and hold a position that is right but unpopular when the evidence supports it.
• Keep the practice honest about what is proven and what is still emerging, particularly in generative search, where confident claims outnumber evidence.

Generative engine optimisation and AI discovery

• Own the agency methodology for GEO and AEO: how a brand earns citation, mention and recommendation inside AI assistants and AI-generated search surfaces.
• Build and maintain the prompt-set methodology per client: how prompts are selected, sampled, tracked over time, and reported as citation and share of voice against named competitors.
• Set the technical foundations for machine readability: structured data at scale, entity and knowledge graph consistency, content chunking and extractability, and internal linking that supports retrieval.
• Own client policy on AI crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and equivalents), including the commercial trade-off between blocking, licensing and visibility, and the emerging standards around agent access.
• Connect GEO work to outcomes that survive scrutiny: referral and assisted conversion from AI assistants, brand query lift, citation share, and a clear statement of what is not yet measurable.
• Track how retrieval and grounding behaviour shifts across the major assistants and update the playbook when it moves, rather than repeating last quarter's advice.

Technical SEO direction

• Set the technical roadmap across multi-market, multilingual and multi-brand estates: hreflang, URL architecture, parameter governance, faceted navigation and indexation strategy at scale.
• Own the agency approach to JavaScript rendering (SSR, SSG, CSR and hybrid modes), edge and CDN configuration, and the search consequences of platform and architecture decisions.
• Sponsor and de-risk site migrations and re-platforming programmes: sequencing, redirect strategy, launch gates, rollback plans and recovery.
• Set Core Web Vitals guardrails across the portfolio and hold client engineering partners to them.
• Review and approve the team's technical output. Nothing high-risk reaches a client without your sign-off.

Log file analysis, data and measurement

• Own server log file analysis at scale across enterprise estates: crawl budget, bot behaviour, orphan discovery, response and render diagnostics, and the split between search engine crawlers and AI agents.
• Build repeatable log pipelines rather than one-off analyses, using BigQuery or equivalent, and convert them into monitoring the team runs on a cycle.
• Join log, crawl, Search Console, analytics and AI-visibility data into a single view of how a site is discovered, rendered, indexed and cited.
• Define the measurement framework that ties technical and GEO work to traffic, conversion and revenue proxies, and defend the methodology when a client challenges it.
• Set monitoring and alerting standards so regressions surface internally before a client finds them.

Reporting, narrative and client communication

• Build the client deck yourself. You own the story, the structure and the argument, not only the data underneath it.
• Turn technical and GEO findings into a narrative a CMO can act on: one clear recommendation per slide, evidence beneath it, commercial consequence attached.
• Own reporting standards across the portfolio, from monthly performance reporting and Looker Studio dashboards to quarterly business reviews and executive readouts.
• Present in the room. Run readouts, workshops and steering sessions, and handle hard questions live rather than taking them away.
• Write clearly. Audit documents, recommendations and change logs should be usable by someone who was not in the room.

Client and commercial ownership

• Own the search workstream across a portfolio of enterprise accounts, with accountability for scope, fee, margin and team utilisation.
• Scope and price engagements end to end: effort estimation, man-day builds, change requests and renewal cases.
• Lead pre-sales for technical SEO, GEO, migration and AI-discovery scopes, including RFP and tender responses, solutioning, commercial narrative and pitch delivery.
• Hold senior client relationships at Head of Digital, engineering lead and CMO level. Run steering conversations, not status calls.
• Identify and convert organic growth opportunities inside existing accounts before the client asks for them.

People and capability

• Line manage managers, assistant managers and specialists: objectives, performance reviews, progression and hiring.
• Own the capability plan for the practice, including training and succession for critical skills across both SEO and GEO.
• Mentor deliberately. Raise the technical ceiling of the team rather than absorbing the hard work yourself.
• Set the bar on hiring and be willing to hold a vacancy open rather than lower it.

Governance, risk and compliance

• Own risk on high-exposure work across the portfolio: migrations, indexation changes, robots and crawler policy, and canonical strategy.
• Ensure change logs, release notes and rollback procedures are maintained to an audit standard, particularly for clients in financial services and other regulated categories.
• Ensure recommendations meet client security, privacy and infrastructure requirements, and that search is represented early in architecture decisions rather than after launch.

Responsibilities

• 10 or more years in SEO with deep technical specialisation, including agency experience on large, complex, multi-market sites.
• Demonstrable GEO or AI-search work you can describe in detail: the methodology you used, what you measured, what moved and what did not.
• Hands-on server log file analysis at scale, done by you rather than delegated, including crawl budget and bot behaviour diagnosis on enterprise estates.
• Working knowledge of SQL or Python for joining crawl, log, Search Console and analytics data, and for automating repeat analysis.
• Strong deck craft. Able to build a client-ready narrative deck end to end in Google Slides or PowerPoint without waiting for a designer.
• Proven commercial ownership: scoping, pricing, margin and utilisation across a portfolio, not delivery of assigned tasks.
• Track record of leading and growing a team of technical practitioners, with direct line management experience.
• Experience in regulated or high-governance categories such as financial services, automotive, travel or telco.
• Depth across Google Search Console, GA4, Looker Studio, BigQuery and enterprise crawling tools.
• Fluency in web fundamentals (HTML, CSS, HTTP), modern JavaScript frameworks and rendering modes, and CDN and edge configuration.
• Executive presence. Able to hold a room with a CMO, an engineering lead and a procurement lead in it, and defend a position with data.
• Strong judgement on what not to do: the ability to kill low-value work and protect the team's focus.

Nice to have

• Experience responding to formal tenders and public sector RFPs in ASEAN.
• Experience with enterprise CMS and commerce platforms such as AEM, Sitecore, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Shopify Plus.
• Familiarity with Singapore and Malaysia market nuance, including language and regional content logic.
• Experience with experimentation platforms and SEO split testing.
• Published or spoken point of view on generative search: talks, articles or internal research.

Tools you'll likely use here

Google Search Console, GA4, Looker Studio, BigQuery, Screaming Frog and its Log File Analyser, server and CDN log sources, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, and AI-visibility tracking tools such as Profound, Peec AI and Ahrefs Brand Radar.

We appreciate your application and will be in touch with shortlisted candidates regarding next steps