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 robust learning and development opportunities all year round.
Play a part in Singapore’s vision to build a Smart Nation and embark on your meaningful journey to build tech for public good. Join us to advance our mission and shape your future with us today!
Learn more about GovTech at tech.gov.sg.
[Overview]
We are looking for a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to join a team modernising a complex business-critical system within the public sector. This is a role for an engineer who enjoys solving hard problems in legacy environments, where business workflows are intricate, data models are dense, and correctness matters as much as delivery speed.
You will work on systems that are operationally important, rich in domain logic, and tightly coupled to real-world processes. Success in this role requires more than strong coding ability. We are looking for someone who can understand business workflows, reason through legacy system behaviour, shape maintainable modern solutions, and build software that is reliable, testable, and safe to evolve.
We value engineers who are comfortable contributing beyond implementation, including helping to shape technical direction and uplift team capability over time.
[What you will be working on]
Digital transformation within the public sector is at the heart of what GovTech does. We harness technology to solve meaningful and underserved problems across multiple domains. In this role, you will help modernise a legacy system with complex workflows, high data integrity requirements, and significant downstream operational impact.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and evolving core application logic and services, while helping the team navigate legacy constraints and modern engineering practices.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Designing and implementing backend services, APIs, and application logic for complex business workflows
- Analysing legacy systems, schemas, and behaviours to uncover business rules, data relationships, and hidden operational constraints
- Translating legacy data structures and process flows into cleaner domain models and maintainable modern service designs
- Designing and evolving data models that preserve integrity while supporting future extensibility
- Building validations, state transitions, orchestration flows, and exception handling for transaction-heavy processes
- Working closely with QA engineers and fellow developers to ensure the system is testable, observable, and production-ready
- Writing high-quality, maintainable code with strong automated test coverage
- Participating in technical design discussions, code reviews, defect analysis, and release readiness activities
- Supporting migration planning, data reconciliation, and coexistence between legacy and modern components where required
- Documenting key technical decisions, business-rule assumptions, and implementation trade-offs clearly
- Contributing to engineering standards, development practices, and delivery discipline across the team
- Providing technical guidance to peers and helping to uplift engineering quality through collaboration, mentoring, and knowledge sharing
[What we are looking for]
Technical Requirements
- Strong hands-on experience in Java
- Strong experience building backend services using frameworks such as Spring Boot
- Strong experience with test automation, such as Junit, JMeter, etc.
- Experience with modern frontend development using NodeJS and TypeScript / JavaScript is a plus.
- Strong experience with REST APIs, backend workflow implementation, and enterprise integration patterns
- Strong experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, Oracle, or equivalent.
- Experience working on legacy enterprise systems or large business-critical systems
- Experience in AWS ecosystem (EC2, RDS, EKS) is a plus.
Additional technical expectations
- Strong software engineering fundamentals in backend and service development
- Strong understanding of data modelling, transactional integrity, and stateful workflow design
- Experience writing unit, integration, and service-level automated tests
- Experience with CI/CD, source control workflows, and release-safe engineering practices
- Ability to troubleshoot across application, data, and integration layers
- Familiarity with observability, production support, and operational debugging
- Good judgment in balancing code quality, delivery pace, and legacy system realities
What we offer you:
GovTech is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives, as we believe that diversity is the foundation to innovation.
Our employee benefits are based on a total rewards approach, offering a holistic and market-competitive suite of perks. These include leave benefits to meet your work-life needs and employee wellness programs.
We champion flexible work arrangements (subject to your job role) and trust that you will manage your own time to deliver your best, wherever you are, and whatever works best for you.
Learn more about life inside GovTech at go.gov.sg/GovTechCareers.
Stay connected with us on social media at go.gov.sg/ConnectWithGovTech