Lead Designer, Manpower Cluster

GovTech Singapore; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work arrangements

Total rewards

Job summary

GovTech Singapore is seeking a senior design leader to shape product and service design across multi‑stakeholder programs supporting Singapore's public sector transformation. You will influence decisions upstream, establish design standards, and champion AI‑assisted ways of working while mentoring teams.

You will partner with MOM and GovTech leadership to ensure coherent end‑to‑end experiences, track impact, and raise the quality bar for mission‑critical digital services across portfolios.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in product design, service design, systems design, or design strategy.
• Experience shaping decisions upstream of delivery, not just executing against a brief.
• Experience in regulated, high-stakes, or public-sector environments preferred.
• Ability to mentor and raise the bar across teams.
• Comfort with operating in ambiguous, long-term transformation programs.

Responsibilities

• Own upstream discovery to frame problems and investment decisions.
• Define end-to-end experience vision across portfolios to ensure coherence.
• Set design standards and use AI responsibly to improve speed and quality.
• Build partnerships with product, engineering, policy, and operations leaders.

Skills

Design leadership

Systems thinking

AI in design

Stakeholder influence

Job description

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.

About the role

Ministry of Manpower (MOM) is undergoing a multi-year transformation - modernising legacy systems, consolidating fragmented service journeys, and building the operational and policy agility to respond to a fast-changing workforce landscape. The underlying promise is a coherent, trustworthy relationship between MOM and the people and businesses it serves.

This role exists not only to shape how MOM designs their product and services at scale, but also to influence why we build, what to build, and how we build. You'll work upstream across programmes, partnering with GovTech and MOM leadership (CIOs, product directors, policy owners, operations leaders) to make sure design is shaping direction before decisions calcify into delivery.

You are not accountable for shipping one feature set. You are accountable for whether MOM's services, taken together, feel coherent and whether the standards and teams behind them can sustain that quality after you've moved on.

[What you will be working on]

Drive upstream discovery, before anyone else has scoped the problem

• Work directly with policy, operations, and business leaders to identify systemic issues that don't show up in any single product's backlog because they sit in the gaps between departments, systems, or mandates.
• Reframe ambiguous, high-stakes problems (regulatory complexity, cross-agency dependencies, conflicting stakeholder needs) into a clear point of view on where MOM should invest, and why.
• Get involved early enough to influence what gets built and why not just how it's built.

Own end-to-end experience across the portfolio, and define what product success means

• Own the end-to-end experience vision across portfolios, ensuring user journeys stay coherent, usable, and consistent across products, systems, and touchpoints.
• Set the north star at the portfolio level: work with Product to define what success looks like, agree the measures that matter, and make sure design outcomes are legible in the same terms as business outcomes.
• Build the data and measurement practice needed to track experience quality and operational efficiency over time so design impact at different levels can be demonstrated, not just asserted.

Set the standard for design excellence and for how MOM designs with AI

• Establish and evolve design standards, methods, and quality bars that hold across teams and programmes: discovery rigor, service coherence, accessibility, and how AI is used responsibly in design work.
• Coach and critique to raise the bar, build repeatable quality through review, shared patterns, and hands‑on mentoring, so good work doesn't depend on any one person being in the room.
• Champion AI-assisted ways of working, faster prototyping, faster validation, faster learning loops - while keeping the craft literacy that lets teams catch it when something's gone wrong. Treat this as a standard you keep redefining, not a playbook you defend.

Build the influence and partnerships that make design's impact real

• Translate design's value into the language MOM and GovTech leadership use : operational efficiency, policy outcomes, cost‑impact ratio, risk mitigation, so design is read as strategic, not decorative.
• Build genuine partnerships with product, engineering, policy, and operations leaders so design has a seat in decisions, not just a role executing them.
• Resolve cross-programmes disagreements where teams, priorities, or stakeholders pull in different directions and facilitate alignment that actually holds once you leave the room.
• Contribute to how GovTech hires, onboards, and grows designers, treating talent development as part of the transformation, not separate from it.

What success looks like

MOM's services feel like they come from one coherent organization, even though many different teams built them.

Teams follow design standards because they're the fastest path to good outcomes, not because they're mandated. That includes how they use AI in their own design process.

Design shows up in strategic conversations before delivery starts, and leadership treats it as a lever for transformation.

[What we are looking for]

Experience and impact

• 15+ years in product design, service design, systems design, or design strategy, with a track record of leading design across complex, multi-stakeholder, multi-programme environments
• Demonstrated experience shaping decisions upstream of delivery not just executing against a defined brief
• Experience in regulated, high-stakes, or public-sector environments strongly preferred; comfort with policy, compliance, and operational constraints as design inputs, not obstacles

Systems thinking and craft

• Strong systems and service design thinking, able to connect user needs, operations, policy, and technology into one coherent point of view
• Deep fluency in design methods, applied pragmatically rather than dogmatically
• Track record of building or evolving design standards, frameworks, or practices that scaled across teams or an organisation
• Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools into design workflows to increase speed and quality and to teach others to do the same responsibly

Leadership and influence

• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders — including leadership without a design background through clarity, evidence, and credibility, not authority
• Experience mentoring and developing designers, with visible impact on people beyond your immediate team
• A collaborative leader who builds trust and momentum across functions, leading through influence rather than positional control

Mindset

• Comfortable operating with significant ambiguity, where the problem itself needs to be defined before it can be solved
• Motivated by long-term, structural impact not just shipping the next release
• Genuinely curious about how AI is changing the work of design, and energised by shaping that change rather than reacting to it

You’ll thrive here if you

• Get energy from finding the problem nobody's scoped yet, and building the case for why it matters.
• Think like a business partner, not just a design advocate : you understand the trade-offs between user needs, operational constraints, and organisational objectives.
• See design standards as something you build and rebuild as the world changes, not a document you defend.
• Have built something from nothing before : a capability, a team, a framework, a service and want to do it again at MOM's scale.
• Are motivated by public service that actually moves the needle — for employers, for migrant workers, for the officers who keep the system running.
• Believe design's job is expanding, not shrinking, as AI takes over more execution, and want to help define what that expanded job looks like.

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.

Stay connected with us on social media at go.gov.sg/ConnectWithGovTech