Senior / Software Engineer , Civil Service College

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

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work arrangements

Leave benefits

Wellness programs

Job summary

GovTech Singapore is seeking a Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer to design, build, operate, and continuously improve software products and services. You will work across multiple components and services, contributing to architectural decisions and ensuring security, reliability, and maintainability.

The role can be at Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer level depending on experience and impact.

Qualifications

• Strong foundation in system design, testing, version control, CI/CD, observability, and security.
• Ability to assess different technical approaches, explain trade-offs clearly, and defend a position.
• Ownership mindset with end-to-end delivery and production accountability.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver moderately complex features spanning multiple components or services.
• Contribute to solution design and implementation across your team's domain.
• Evaluate options and trade-offs to align with product needs and goals.
• Proactively improve existing systems through refactoring and reducing technical debt.

Skills

System design

CI/CD

Observability

Security

Ownership mindset

Stakeholder communication

AI-assisted development

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.

Job Overview

As a Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, operate, and continuously improve software products and services. You will work across multiple components and services, contribute to technical decisions, and help ensure the systems we build are secure, reliable, maintainable, and fit for purpose.

The role may be appointed at Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer depending on experience, technical depth, and demonstrated scope of impact.

What you will be working on

Design and deliver quality software

• Design and deliver moderately complex features spanning multiple components, services, or new integrations, taking into account modularity, scalability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Contribute to solution design and implementation across your team's domain.
• Evaluate technical options, articulate trade-offs, and recommend solutions that align with product needs and team goals.
• Proactively improve existing systems through refactoring and reduction of technical debt.

Build reliable engineering and delivery practices

• Develop and improve automated testing across unit, integration, end-to-end, and performance testing where appropriate.
• Contribute to automation, observability, CI/CD, and deployment practices that improve delivery speed and system reliability.
• Build a strong understanding of product architecture, dependencies, and data flows, and use this knowledge to make sound technical decisions.

Own what you build in production

• Take responsibility for your work beyond deployment, including monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
• Lead or contribute to incident triage and debugging for production issues within your domain.
• Participate in post-incident reviews, identify root causes, and propose concrete preventive actions.
• Ensure appropriate monitoring and alerting are in place so that issues can be detected and addressed early.

Build secure and compliant systems

• Treat security, compliance, reliability, and performance as design constraints rather than afterthoughts.
• Apply recommended platforms, tools, and organisational standards effectively, and identify or elevate situations where deviations are necessary.

Use AI effectively and responsibly in software development

• Use AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity while maintaining strong standards for correctness, security, reliability, and maintainability.
• Write clear technical specifications and design documents that provide effective context for AI-assisted development as well as other engineers.
• Critically review AI-generated solutions and identify technical debt, antipatterns, security risks, incorrect assumptions, and other quality issues before they reach production.
• For senior engineers, establish good team practices for reviewing AI-generated code and determining what requires human verification.

Take ownership and help the team succeed

• Take end-to-end ownership of projects, including work where the problem or requirements may initially be ambiguous.
• Break down problems, prioritise work, identify risks, and translate team goals into actionable technical plans.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to deliver successful outcomes.
• Share knowledge and provide constructive technical feedback to other engineers; senior engineers will also be expected to mentor and support junior team members.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of engineering practices, team effectiveness, and technical quality.

What we are looking for

We are looking for engineers who combine strong technical foundations with practical judgement and a willingness to own real-world outcomes.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: You have a solid understanding of system design, testing, version control, CI/CD, observability, security, and writing clean, maintainable code.
• Good engineering judgement: You can assess different technical approaches, explain trade-offs clearly, and defend a technical position while remaining open to better alternatives.
• Comfort with ambiguity: You can take unclear policy, education, operational, or user needs and progressively turn them into a practical product and technical solution.
• Ownership mindset: You do not stop at prototype or development handoff. You care about deployment, production monitoring, user feedback, operational issues, and long-term maintainability.
• Stakeholder collaboration: You can communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including those working in sensitive public-sector domains.
• Responsible AI-assisted development: You are proficient in using AI-assisted development tools responsibly and apply strong engineering judgement to critically review generated code for correctness, security, maintainability, and quality.
• Delivery across components: You can deliver moderately complex work across multiple components, with increasing independence and collaboration with teammates on design and architectural decisions.

As a Senior Software Engineer, Additionally

• You can write clear technical specifications and design documents that enable effective AI-assisted delivery, and help establish strong team practices for the safe, responsible, and high-quality use of AI in software engineering.
• You have greater end-to-end ownership, independent technical decision-making, stronger design capability, mentoring of junior engineers, and an active role in raising engineering standards across the team.

Nice to Have

You do not need to meet all of these. Experience in one or more of the following would be advantageous:

• Low-code development experience, particularly with OutSystems or similar enterprise low-code platforms.
• Experience building and operating production LLM or AI-enabled applications.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks, prompt/context engineering, model monitoring, AI observability and tracing, or AI safety and application guardrails.
• Hands-on experience in one or more programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go.
• Experience with cloud services (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP), CI/CD, and production deployment.
• Experience delivering software in government, regulated, security-sensitive, or cloud-restricted environments.

Familiarity with education, public-sector operations, procurement, or government digital services.

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