The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) is the lead agency driving Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives and public sector digital transformation. As the Centre of Excellence for Infocomm Technology and Smart Systems (ICT & SS), GovTech develops the Singapore Government’s capabilities in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, Application Development, Smart City Technology, Digital Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity.
At GovTech, we offer you a purposeful career to make lives better, where we empower our people to master their craft through continuous learning and development opportunities.
Play a part in Singapore’s vision to build a Smart Nation and embark on your meaningful journey to build tech for public good.
Learn more about GovTech at tech.gov.sg.
[About Singpass]
We build Singpass, Singapore’s national digital identity system, one of the most critical and widely used digital platforms in the country. Singpass enables authentication, authorisation, digital signatures, corporate identity through Corppass, government-verified data sharing through Myinfo, and secure transactions across government and private-sector services.
The Data Platform team builds and operates the foundational data capabilities that power Singpass products and services. Our platform enables secure, reliable, and scalable data ingestion, processing, governance, and analytics, supporting use cases such as operational intelligence, fraud detection, real-time decision-making, business intelligence, and data-driven product innovation.
[What the role is]
As a Senior Data Engineer in the Data Platform team, you will design, build, and operate highly reliable data systems that handle critical data at scale. You will work across data engineering, software engineering, distributed systems, and platform engineering to ensure that data can move securely and reliably across Singpass.
You will:
- Design, build, and operate scalable data platforms and distributed data systems that support both real-time and batch workloads.
- Build and evolve event-driven architectures and stream-processing systems, modelling complex event flows to support fraud detection, product insights, business intelligence, and real-time capabilities.
- Develop robust data ingestion and processing pipelines with strong guarantees around data quality, freshness, availability, and integrity.
- Design platform capabilities that make it easier and safer for engineering, data, and product teams to consume and work with data.
- Build observability and telemetry to monitor platform health, including data freshness, schema drift, pipeline performance, failures, and other DataOps signals.
- Diagnose complex production issues across applications, data pipelines, infrastructure, and distributed systems, and address their root causes.
- Design and evolve architectures that meet stringent requirements for security, reliability, resilience, scalability, and maintainability.
- Write secure, high-quality, production-ready code and contribute to strong engineering standards through design reviews and code reviews.
- Improve developer experience through better tooling, automation, platform abstractions, and engineering workflows.
- Manage technical debt and continuously improve the reliability, performance, and operability of the platform.
- Work closely with software engineers, data scientists, product managers, cybersecurity specialists, and other teams to translate product and operational needs into scalable technical solutions.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will also be expected to:
- Provide technical leadership for complex data platform initiatives from design through production.
- Lead architecture and technical design discussions, helping teams navigate trade-offs across scalability, reliability, security, performance, and delivery.
- Establish and champion engineering and DataOps best practices across the platform.
- Identify opportunities to simplify architectures, strengthen platform capabilities, and improve engineering productivity.
- Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards through technical guidance, design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
- Influence technical decisions beyond your immediate area and collaborate across teams on shared platform and architecture challenges.
- Support technical hiring and contribute to building engineering capability within Singpass.
Working on Singpass means working on infrastructure where security, reliability, and trust are non-negotiable. You will have the opportunity to solve challenging distributed data problems while building capabilities that directly support Singapore's national digital identity ecosystem.
[What we are looking for]
We value strong engineering fundamentals and technical judgment over experience with any particular technology.
We are looking for engineers who:
- Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production-grade distributed or data-intensive systems.
- Have experience designing and operating event-driven architectures, messaging systems, and/or stream-processing systems.
- Understand data platform concepts such as ingestion, transformation, storage, data modelling, data quality, governance, observability, and data lifecycle management.
- Can reason about distributed-system challenges including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, reliability, and performance.
- Understand how to design systems for both real-time and batch data-processing workloads.
- Build systems with strong operational practices, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and observability.
- Think carefully about security, privacy, and data governance when designing systems that handle sensitive information.
- Have strong debugging and problem-solving skills and are comfortable investigating complex problems across multiple layers of a system.
- Are comfortable making and communicating technical trade-offs through architecture discussions, design documents, and code reviews.
- Take ownership of systems beyond implementation, including deployment, operations, reliability, and continuous improvement.
- Communicate effectively and collaborate across engineering, product, data, cybersecurity, and other stakeholder groups.
- Mentor other engineers and help raise the technical bar of the wider engineering team.
Experience with technologies or concepts such as Kafka or other event-streaming platforms, stream processing, cloud data infrastructure, data lakes or warehouses, schema management, DataOps, feature stores, and large-scale distributed systems would be valuable, although we do not expect candidates to have worked with every technology.
What it is like working here
- Security and Reliability First – Singpass handles critical national infrastructure and sensitive data, requiring strong engineering discipline and thoughtful risk management.
- Engineering Ownership – Engineers influence architecture and product direction and own systems throughout their lifecycle.
- Platform Mindset – We build reusable capabilities that enable other teams to move faster and more safely, rather than solving each data problem independently.
- Data at Scale – You will work on systems supporting high-volume event streams, operational data, analytics, and real-time use cases.
- Technical Depth – Senior engineers are expected to stay close to architecture, design, code, and production systems while providing technical leadership.
- Continuous Improvement – We use operational metrics, incidents, DataOps signals, and engineering feedback to continuously improve our systems and ways of working.
GovTech is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives.
We champion flexible work arrangements (subject to your job role) and trust you to manage your time to deliver your best.
Learn more about life inside GovTech at go.gov.sg/GovTechCareers.