Technical Lead, Materials AI & Engineering

Starry Recruitment; Singapore; On-site; SGD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Starry Recruitment is seeking a hands-on Technical Lead for Materials AI & Engineering to drive technical strategy, architecture, and development of AI, data, and search platforms supporting R&D. The role combines leadership, hands-on engineering, and team management to build scalable data and AI systems.

You will lead a multidisciplinary team across AI, Data, and Software Engineering, guide hiring and mentoring, and collaborate with product managers to translate business needs into technical

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing and developing engineering teams.
• Own and execute technical roadmaps for complex, data‑intensive products or platforms.
• Experience with data platforms, data pipelines, search, information retrieval, or distributed systems.
• Strong backend architecture, databases, distributed systems, and APIs knowledge.
• Hands-on production engineering with Java, Go, Scala, Python, Rust, or C++.
• Excellent communication and cross‑functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical roadmap across data, search, AI, and backend systems.
• Lead data ingestion, parsing, normalization, knowledge modeling, indexing, and retrieval.
• Improve data quality, search relevance, coverage, freshness, performance, and scalability.
• Build and manage a multidisciplinary team across AI, Data, and Software Engineering.
• Lead hiring, performance management, and mentoring.
• Establish engineering best practices and develop technical leaders.
• Drive production engineering, testing, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Evaluate and productionize AI/LLM-powered applications.
• Partner with Product Managers to translate needs into technical plans.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Technical roadmaps

Data platforms

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Languages: Java/Go/Scala/Python/Rust/C

Code review

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Technical Lead, Materials AI & Engineering

Work Arrangement: On-site

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Technical Lead to drive the technical strategy, architecture, and development of AI, data, and search platforms supporting materials R&D.

The role combines technical leadership, hands-on engineering, AI/search expertise, and team management, with a focus on building scalable and reliable data and AI systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Roadmap
• Define and execute technical roadmaps across data, search, AI, and backend systems.
• Assess existing architecture, identify gaps, and drive system improvements.
• Data & Search Engineering
• Lead work across data ingestion, parsing, normalization, knowledge modeling, indexing, and retrieval.
• Improve data quality, search relevance, coverage, freshness, performance, and scalability.
• Engineering Leadership
• Build and manage a multidisciplinary team across AI, Data, and Software Engineering.
• Lead hiring, performance management, career development, and technical mentoring.
• Establish engineering best practices and develop technical leaders.
• Production Engineering
• Drive best practices in system design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Improve system reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Evaluate and productionize AI/LLM-powered applications.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product Managers and domain experts to translate business and customer needs into technical plans and engineering priorities.

Requirements

• Proven experience managing and developing engineering teams, including hiring, team building, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong track record of owning and executing technical roadmaps for complex, data-intensive products or platforms.
• Substantial experience with data platforms, data pipelines, search, information retrieval, or distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of backend architecture, databases, distributed systems, and APIs.
• Strong hands-on production engineering experience with Java, Go, Scala, Python, Rust, C++, or similar languages.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to review code, evaluate technical decisions, and solve complex engineering problems.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Search Relevance, Hybrid Search, RAG, or LLM-powered applications.
• Experience with Document Intelligence, OCR, or structured information extraction.
• Experience with Ontologies, Entity Resolution, or Knowledge Graphs.
• Experience with scientific/technical data, materials science, chemistry, or patents.