Product Ops Specialist (Giant Robot Lab)

GovTech; Singapore; On-site; SGD 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

GovTech, the lead agency driving Singapore's Smart Nation initiatives, hosts Giant Robots Labs inside the Government Technology Office. The team turns ambitious ideas into pilots, proving concepts quickly with real users, while automating coordination and reporting to keep pilots moving.

The role focuses on running pilots, clearing blockers to real users, and maintaining cost and quality for limited beta, using AI tools and lean teams to deliver fast, tangible public-good outcomes.

Qualifications

• You would rather build or automate an operation than administer one, and you reach for a script, a workflow or an agent before a recurring meeting.
• You are comfortable that the process does not exist yet and that part of your job is deciding how little of it we need.
• You enjoy the unglamorous blockers. Approvals, access, classification, procurement and support are where pilots quietly die, and you find it satisfying to kill those delays permanently rather than route around them each time.
• You can hold an opinion about whether a product is working, and defend it with evidence in a room full of people who built it.
• You are willing to say that a pilot should stop.

Responsibilities

• Run pilot intake. Help decide which problems become pilots, what question each pilot is actually testing, and when it has been answered.
• Clear the path to real users. Data sharing, security and classification review, agency sponsorship, accounts and access: a pilot team should spend its weeks building, not waiting.
• Own the operational side of limited beta, including user onboarding and support, incident response, cost and quality monitoring, and the dull reliability work that decides whether an agency trusts us with the next thing.
• Instrument pilots so that continue-or-kill decisions rest on usage and evidence rather than on who argues hardest.
• Keep the lab's context legible. Decisions, hypotheses, results and abandoned approaches, recorded in a form that both people and agents can read and act on.
• Build the lab's internal tooling and automation, agentic where that is the right answer, for the coordination and reporting work that would otherwise eat a team's attention. Where you can build it yourself, build it.
• Design the lab's ways of working, keep them light, and retire them when they stop earning their keep.
• Hold the GovTech interfaces: platform teams, identity, data infrastructure, procurement, legal, security. Know who answers which question, and be owed enough favours that the answer arrives in a day.
• Prepare successful pilots for what comes next, with the evidence, runbook, cost picture and open risks that a productisation team needs in order to pick one up.
• Notice when a pilot is drifting. No users, an untestable hypothesis, a prototype quietly becoming a system somebody has to run forever. Raise it early, including when nobody wants to hear it.
• Run the lab's own measurement. How fast pilots move, how many reach real users, what they cost to operate, and which of our decisions turned out to be wrong.
• Help new people and new teams get productive, which in a lab like this means tools and context more than induction decks.
• Experiment with the organisation itself. Team shapes, role boundaries, where agents sit in a team, and an honest read on whether last quarter's experiment worked.

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 Giant Robots Labs

Giant Robots Labs is the experimental technology lab inside GovTech's Government Technology Office. We turn ambitious ideas into working products quickly, test them with real users, and operate the promising ones through prototype and limited beta. We also experiment with the lab itself: how small teams are organised, how software gets built when agents do much of the work, and what a product operation needs to look like when a pilot can reach real users in weeks.

Product operations usually exists because coordination, documentation and reporting are expensive manual work. Much of that work is now automatable, and we would rather automate it than staff it. So this is not a role that administers a process, maintains a backlog on someone else's behalf, or turns status into slides. It is the role that makes the lab run: deciding which problems become pilots, clearing the unglamorous path that stands between a working prototype and a real government user, and making sure we can tell whether any of it worked.

What you will be working on

• Run pilot intake. Help decide which problems become pilots, what question each pilot is actually testing, and when it has been answered.
• Clear the path to real users. Data sharing, security and classification review, agency sponsorship, accounts and access: a pilot team should spend its weeks building, not waiting.
• Own the operational side of limited beta, including user onboarding and support, incident response, cost and quality monitoring, and the dull reliability work that decides whether an agency trusts us with the next thing.
• Instrument pilots so that continue-or-kill decisions rest on usage and evidence rather than on who argues hardest.
• Keep the lab's context legible. Decisions, hypotheses, results and abandoned approaches, recorded in a form that both people and agents can read and act on.
• Build the lab's internal tooling and automation, agentic where that is the right answer, for the coordination and reporting work that would otherwise eat a team's attention. Where you can build it yourself, build it.
• Design the lab's ways of working, keep them light, and retire them when they stop earning their keep.
• Hold the GovTech interfaces: platform teams, identity, data infrastructure, procurement, legal, security. Know who answers which question, and be owed enough favours that the answer arrives in a day.
• Prepare successful pilots for what comes next, with the evidence, runbook, cost picture and open risks that a productisation team needs in order to pick one up.
• Notice when a pilot is drifting. No users, an untestable hypothesis, a prototype quietly becoming a system somebody has to run forever. Raise it early, including when nobody wants to hear it.
• Run the lab's own measurement. How fast pilots move, how many reach real users, what they cost to operate, and which of our decisions turned out to be wrong.
• Help new people and new teams get productive, which in a lab like this means tools and context more than induction decks.
• Experiment with the organisation itself. Team shapes, role boundaries, where agents sit in a team, and an honest read on whether last quarter's experiment worked.

You will thrive here if

• You would rather build or automate an operation than administer one, and you reach for a script, a workflow or an agent before a recurring meeting.
• You are comfortable that the process does not exist yet and that part of your job is deciding how little of it we need.
• You enjoy the unglamorous blockers. Approvals, access, classification, procurement and support are where pilots quietly die, and you find it satisfying to kill those delays permanently rather than route around them each time.
• You can hold an opinion about whether a product is working, and defend it with evidence in a room full of people who built it.
• You are willing to say that a pilot should stop.
• You work comfortably with engineers and designers as a peer rather than as coordination between them.
• You are hands‑on with AI tools and curious about what they make unnecessary, including parts of your own job.
• You are energised by lean teams, broad ownership and pr