The posting
About NParks
The National Parks Board (NParks) is responsible for enhancing and managing Singapore's greenery, biodiversity, wildlife and animal health, while fostering community stewardship of nature.
As part of NParks' Digital Transformation journey, we are moving towards a product-centric operating model to deliver secure, reliable and user-centred digital products for citizens, businesses, volunteers, and officers. NParks' transformation plan includes the setup of Product, Design and Engineering Lead roles, with the first product team intended to establish the foundation for future product teams.
As the Engineering Lead, you will be part of NParks' founding product team, working closely with the Product Lead and Design Lead to shape, build and scale the first product. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will not only set the technical direction, but also be expected to contribute directly to architecture, engineering practices, solution design, code quality, technical delivery, and operational readiness.
You will help NParks build modern product engineering capability — moving from early discovery and POC/POV experimentation towards secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable digital services. NParks' transformation plan highlights the need for in-house ownership of product governance, architecture, technical guardrails, and continuous improvement, supported by outsourced teams for Day-2 operations.
What You Will Be Working On
As Engineering Lead, you will be the technical anchor for NParks' first product team. You will guide engineering decisions from discovery and prototyping through to product delivery, operations and continuous improvement.
You will work across product areas such as citizen services, animal management, urban tree management, community engagement, parks and greenery management, and enterprise platforms. NParks' digital portfolio includes product areas such as Pet Animal Licensing, Remote Tree Management, Volunteer Management, Maven II Parks & Greenery, Common Data Platform and AI/Automation platforms.
Technical Leadership and Hands-on Engineering
· Serve as the technical lead for NParks' first product team, working closely with the Product Lead and Design Lead to translate product outcomes into practical engineering solutions.
- Personally contribute to solution design, architecture decisions, technical spikes, prototypes, code reviews, and engineering delivery.
- Provide hands-on guidance to software engineers and delivery partners to ensure solutions are well-designed, secure, maintainable, and fit for purpose.
- Lead by example in applying modern engineering practices, balancing speed of delivery with technical quality and long-term sustainability.
- Help the team move confidently from problem discovery and early experiments to production-grade services.
Product Engineering and Delivery
· Work with Product and Design counterparts to frame problems, test assumptions, validate technical approaches and deliver solutions iteratively.
- Support rapid prototyping, POC/POV development and learning loops before scaling solutions into production.
- Translate user needs, business requirements and operating constraints into clear engineering approaches and delivery plans.
- Make practical trade-offs between speed, simplicity, reliability, security, cost and future scalability.
- Ensure engineering work contributes directly to product outcomes and measurable organisational value.
Architecture and Technical Guardrails
· Establish the technical architecture and engineering guardrails for NParks' first product team.
- Define standards for system design, integration, APIs, data flows, security, observability, maintainability, and deployment.
- Ensure technical decisions support reuse, interoperability, and alignment with whole-of-government platforms where relevant.
- Avoid unnecessary complexity while ensuring systems can scale and adapt to future requirements.
- Guide modernisation of legacy components where needed, ensuring technical debt is managed deliberately.
Secure and Reliable Delivery
· Build security, privacy, resilience, and reliability considerations into the product from the start.
- Work with cybersecurity, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure appropriate controls, monitoring and operational support are in place.
- Establish engineering practices such as automated testing, CI/CD, DevSecOps, logging, monitoring, and structured incident response.
- Track and improve service reliability indicators such as uptime, response time, error rates and incident recovery.
- NParks' transformation plan specifically identifies Ship Faster and Safer through CI/CD pipelines and Engineer for Reliability through tracking uptime, response time and error rates.
Engineering Practices and Quality
· Set expectations for code quality, automated testing, peer review, documentation, and production readiness.
- Help establish practical engineering workflows that allow the team to deliver safely and continuously.
- Support the use of modern tools, cloud services, automation and AI-assisted development where appropriate.
- Ensure both new features and BAU improvements contribute to better maintainability, reliability and user outcomes.
- Create repeatable engineering practices that future NParks product teams can build upon.
Team Building and Capability Development
· Coach and mentor software engineers, technical leads, apprentices, and vendor teams.
- Help build the first product team into a model for future product teams within NParks.
- Identify technical capability gaps and recommend how the team should be strengthened over time.
- Support hiring, onboarding and development of engineering talent.
- Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, craftsmanship, transparency and continuous learning.
Stakeholder and Vendor Collaboration
· Communicate technical options, risks and trade-offs clearly to Product Leads, Design Leads, business owners, senior management, engineers, and vendors.
- Work effectively with GovTech partners, internal NParks teams and external delivery partners.
- Ensure vendors and delivery partners follow NParks' technical standards, architecture direction, and quality expectations.
- Build trust through sound judgement, practical technical leadership, and transparent communication.
What We Are Looking For
Hands-on Engineering Experience
· Strong hands-on experience designing, building, integrating or operating production-grade digital systems.
- Ability to contribute directly to technical solutioning, architecture, code reviews, technical spikes and engineering troubleshooting.
- Strong understanding of software engineering principles, system design, APIs, integration, cloud platforms, databases, data flows and operational support.
- Practical experience delivering secure, reliable and maintainable applications in real-world production environments.
- Technically credible with engineers, architects, vendors and stakeholders, with the ability to discuss implementation trade-offs confidently.
Product Engineering Mindset
· Experienced across the full product lifecycle — from problem framing, discovery, and rapid experimentation to POC/POV validation, production rollout and continuous improvement.
- Comfortable working in a multidisciplinary product team with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders.
- Able to translate product goals and user needs into practical, iterative technical delivery.
- Strong judgement on when to optimise for speed, when to simplify, and when to invest in architecture, reliability, security and interoperability.
- Outcome-oriented, ensuring engineering decisions are linked to user value, organisational goals and public good.
Technical Leadership
· Proven ability to lead engineering workstreams or small engineering teams while remaining hands-on.
- Experience setting technical direction, architecture principles, coding standards, and delivery practices.
- Ability to guide engineers and vendors towards consistent, high-quality engineering outcomes.
- Strong ability to identify technical risks, remove blockers and make pragmatic engineering decisions under constraints.
- Experience building engineering practices from the ground up would be highly valuable.
Secure, Reliable and Maintainable by Design
· Strong appreciation of secure-by-design and reliable-by-design principles.
- Experience with DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, logging, incident response and root-cause analysis.
- Ability to design and operate systems that are maintainable, cost-effective, and adaptable to future needs.
- Experience managing technical debt, modernising legacy systems or improving maintainability over time.
- Familiarity with government, enterprise or regulated environments would be advantageous.
Architecture and Systems Thinking
· Ability to connect product-level engineering decisions to broader enterprise architecture, interoperability, reuse, and platform strategy.
- Strong systems-thinking mindset, with the ability to manage dependencies across systems, teams, vendors, and platforms.
- Ability to simplify complex technical landscapes and translate them into practical engineering roadmaps.
- Experience working with cloud platforms, data platforms, AI-enabled systems, workflow platforms, geospatial systems or high-volume citizen/business-facing services would be advantageous.
Collaboration and Communication
· Strong communicator who can explain technical issues, options, and risks clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Able to work closely with Product Leads and Design Leads to make balanced decisions across user needs, technical feasibility, and business value.
- Comfortable engaging senior management, business owners, cybersecurity teams, infrastructure teams, engineers, and vendors.
- Builds confidence through sound judgement, transparency, empathy and practical delivery experience.
Engineering Culture and Capability Building
· Passionate about building strong engineering practices and uplifting engineering capability.
- Able to coach engineers, apprentices, and vendor teams in modern engineering practices.
- Demonstrates ownership, accountability, curiosity, and continuous learning.
- Keeps current with modern practices such as cloud engineering, platform automation, AI-assisted development, and DevSecOps.
- Willing to be both a leader and a builder — setting direction while also rolling up sleeves to help the team deliver.
Preferred Experience
· Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Engineering or a related discipline, with significant experience (typically 8+ years) designing, building and operating digital products and platforms. Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across the full product lifecycle, from problem discovery and prototyping through to production delivery, operations and continuous improvement.
- Experience establishing engineering standards, architecture principles, DevSecOps practices, and modern software delivery capabilities within multidisciplinary product teams would be highly advantageous.
- Experience standing up a new product team, product platform or engineering capability from early stage.
- Experience working in public sector, regulated, operational or mission-driven environments.
- Experience delivering products involving citizen services, regulatory workflows, operational technology, data platforms, AI/automation or geospatial capabilities.
- Experience working with hybrid teams comprising internal officers, GovTech partners and external vendors.
- Experience modernising legacy systems or transitioning systems from project-based delivery to product-centric ownership.
Why Join Us
You will have the opportunity to be part of NParks' founding product team and help shape how product engineering is established within the organisation.
This role is not only about delivering one system. It is about helping NParks build the engineering foundation for future product teams — setting standards, proving new ways of working, strengthening technical ownership and delivering meaningful digital services that support Singapore's City in Nature vision.
You will work on real-world problems that affect citizens, businesses, volunteers, arborists, officers and operational teams, while helping NParks build secure, reliable and user-centred products at scale.
