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.
[What you will be working on]
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will take ownership of complex, cross-cutting technical work while actively raising the bar for those around you. You will be expected to operate with a high degree of independence — making sound architectural decisions, leading incident response, and delivering features that span multiple services or systems — while also investing meaningfully in the growth of junior software engineers and the health of the team.
This is a role for someone who is equally comfortable writing a technical design document, reviewing a colleague's code for AI-introduced antipatterns, and facilitating alignment between engineers and stakeholders on a tricky design trade-off.
Craft & Technical Execution
- You will design and deliver moderately complex features that span multiple components or services, with genuine attention to modularity, scalability, and resiliency. This means evaluating solution options, sharing well-reasoned recommendations, and proactively addressing technical debt before it compounds.
- On quality and DevOps, you will contribute to reusable test automation frameworks and help the team adopt better observability, CI/CD, and automation practices. You will ensure that features you own are properly monitored and that issues surface early rather than in production.
- You will build deep knowledge of your team's product architecture, dependencies, and data flows, and use that knowledge to make independent technical decisions and author design documents with minimal guidance. You will also conduct architecture reviews for junior engineers' work, offering constructive and actionable feedback.
- When incidents occur, you will lead triage and debugging within your domain, contribute root cause analyses, and drive concrete preventive actions through post-incident reviews.
- Security, compliance, and performance are design constraints in your work, not afterthoughts. You will apply the organisation's recommended platforms and tools effectively, and escalate deviations appropriately.
- You will also play a key role in how the team works with AI-assisted development — writing clear, unambiguous technical specifications that serve as effective context for both AI tools and junior engineers, identifying when AI-generated code introduces technical debt or security risks, and establishing team-level norms for reviewing AI-generated output before it merges.
Ownership & Delivery
- You will take full end-to-end ownership of broad project scopes, navigating uncertainty and ensuring successful outcomes.
- You are comfortable taking calculated risks and learning openly from both successes and failures.
- You actively mentor junior team members — sharing knowledge, breaking down problems, and providing constructive feedback that raises overall team productivity.
Strategic Contribution
- You will translate team goals into actionable plans, breaking down and prioritising work and contributing to project strategy.
- You proactively identify opportunities, drive workstreams, and synthesise data into clear recommendations that connect to organisational impact.
- At the project level, you anticipate risks and put mitigations in place before they become blockers.
Culture & Organisational Influence
- You will coordinate cross-functional collaboration and help ensure projects are delivered effectively across team boundaries.
- You navigate disagreements constructively, facilitating alignment among team members and stakeholders.
- You challenge existing processes where improvement is warranted and drive change initiatives at the team or division level. You share learnings openly — both wins and failures — and make recommendations that help the team continuously improve.
People Management
- This role includes a developmental people management component. With close guidance from your software engineering manager, you will support team coordination by communicating project goals and priorities clearly, and helping team members understand how their individual work connects to broader objectives.
- You will conduct regular check-ins with one or two direct or indirect reports, focusing on work progress and basic feedback delivery, and help team members work through day-to-day blockers with technical mentoring.
- You will also participate in recruitment activities where applicable.
[What we are looking for]
You are a technically strong software engineer who takes pride in the quality and maintainability of your work. You think carefully about architecture, write clearly, and communicate well with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You are generous with your knowledge and invested in the growth of those around you. You are comfortable with ambiguity and take ownership seriously — not just of your own output, but of the outcomes your team is working towards.
- Have a demonstrated ability to build software - Prior work and personal projects count for much more than specific degrees.
- Write code to solve abstract programming problems - Clear thinking, the ability to debug, and understanding the limits of an approach matter much more than getting the “correct” answer.
- Talk and reason about code with other engineers - We work as a team, so you need to be able to not just solve problems, but have other people understand your solutions.
- Take initiative to make things happen - Our job is to push for change in government, so we need to challenge the status quo and not wait for instruction.
- Want to work for the public good - We are public servants; we serve the public. This sometimes means ignoring political pressures and misguided policies. We need people who will push back if something is not in public interest.
- Overall, we look for people who have ability, initiative, good communication, and strong values.
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