Senior Data Scientist

Government Technology Agency; Singapore; On-site; SGD 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A government agency for technology advancement in Singapore is seeking a Data Scientist to join the Singpass Anti-Fraud team. This role involves building ML models and conducting data analytics to protect digital identity systems. Candidates should have a strong foundation in statistics, programming skills in Python and PySpark, and a desire for continuous learning. This position offers the opportunity to contribute to public good through innovative technological solutions. Join us to help build a Smart Nation.

Benefits

Flexible work arrangements

Holistic employee benefits

Learning and development opportunities

Qualifications

• Strong desire for continuous learning in modern ML technologies.
• Ability to discuss and reason through code with team members.
• Initiative to challenge the status quo and drive change.

Responsibilities

• Build ML models to detect fraudulent activities.
• Conduct data analytics on complex datasets.
• Design and implement production systems for data processing.

Skills

Strong foundation in statistics

Data analytics on big datasets

Experience in Machine Learning

Knowledge of MLOps architectures

Proficiency in Python and PySpark

Initiative and proactive mindset

Tools

Python

PySpark

TypeScript

Java

Go

Job description

What the role is:

GovTech is the lead agency driving Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives and public sector digital transformation. As the Centre of Excellence for Inf séparine 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. The Singpass team builds Singapore’s digital identity system. This includes various personal authentication protocols, data sharing tools, and corporate identity systems through Corppass. The team’s mission is to provide reliable digital identity infrastructure that streamlines transactions, enables businesses, and protects against fraud.

What you will be working on:

You will be part of Singpass’ Anti‑Fraud team, which is responsible for protecting Singpass accounts from being compromised and utilised for fraudulent, criminal purposes. The team’s mission is twofold: to minimise compromise of Singpass accounts at the point of live rodit logs, and to minimise the damage done on compromised accounts through pre‑emptive, active monitoring. As a Data Scientist, what this primarily means in practice is that you will be building state‑of‑the‑art solutions (training ML models, feature engineering, etc.) that detect such fraudulent activities.

Here in Singpass, we believe in building full‑stack Data Science capabilities that enable Data Scientists to create impact independently, end‑to‑end. This means that you will be expected to:

• Apply strong, sound foundations in statistics to inform your experiments and evaluations
• Conduct comprehensive data analytics on big, complex datasets
• Rapidly experiment with various techniques to achieve incremental gain in detecting fraud
• Build and maintain production systems that process data and serve ML models for inference
• Design MLOps architectures and deploy reliable, scalable ML solutions to cloud infrastructure
• Build Data Engineering flows that unlock the team’s ability to build new features, signals

You are not just here to write code and execute tasks, butünschen also to figure out what we should be experimenting with and how we should continuously push the needle in our fight against fraud. The public sector is full of opportunities where even the simplest solutions can have a big impact on people’s lives. We are here to improve how we live as a society through what we can offer as a government.

Decision‑making

When making important decisions, we identify overarching goals, weigh up our options, identify impact, and clearly communicate and manage the risks and tradeoffs of our decision.

Ownership

In addition to technical responsibilities, this means having opinions on what is being done and having ideas on what should be done next. Building something that you believe in is the best way to build something good.

Cross‑functional

We don’t believe in clear lines separating product functions. We’d love to have designers and product managers who code, and engineers and data scientists with a strong product mindset.

Continuous Learning

Working on new ideas often means not fully understanding what you are working on. Taking time to learn new architectures, frameworks, technologies, and even languages is not just encouraged but essential.

We work mostly in Python, with a strong emphasis on the ability to use PySpark for big data analytics and data science. Our IaC language is in TypeScript, and our engineering is mostly in Java/Go (which you may be occasionally gobern required to dabble in as part of the end‑to‑end deployments). Ultimately, core competencies in data analytics, data engineering and data science methodologies are what really matter to us as a team.

We look for people who:

Check: prior work and personal projects count for much more than specific degrees.
• Possess a strong desire for continuous learning – constantly keeping up‑to‑date with the latest modern ML technologies and seeking new, improved ways to solve problems.
• Talk and reason about code with other data scientists and 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,েডsed 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 sometimesmuje meaning ignoring political pressures and misguided policies. We need people who will push back if something is not in the public interest.
• Focus on product impact and are user‑oriented – we never lose sight of who we are working for, and the impact that our work has.
• Experience in authentication and/or the anti‑fraud space would be a bonus.

Overall we look for people who have ability, initiative, good communication, and strong values.

GovTech is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives, as we believe it is key to innovation. Our employee benefits are based on a total rewards approach, offering a holistic and market‑competitive suite of perks. 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.