Chief Architect - TradeNet

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. How we build [What you will be working on] About TradeNet TradeNet is Singapore’s National Single Window for trade permit processing. It processes over 9 million permit applications annually across import, export and transshipment. As one of Singapore’s key trade systems, TradeNet is being brought in-house to strengthen technology ownership and long-term sustainability. How we build Designated as critical IT infrastructure, we favor simple, durable technology choices over the latest trends. We prioritize systems that are easy to reason about, operate, and maintain for the long term. We operate with high autonomy. Engineers are expected to think deeply, exercise sound judgement, and take ownership of technical decisions. You own the code from technical design through to production. We practice and value honest feedback, practical decision-making and real impact. We are replacing the decades-old legacy system with a modern, cloud-native platform.The rebuild touches everything: decomposing a monolithic Java/J2EE application into cloud-native services, reconstructing undocumented business logic from incomplete legacy code, clearing compliance and data-governance constraints, and delivering a platform that multiple government agencies depend on daily. The Chief Architect owns the technical coherence of this effort. You define how the system is structured, how teams interface with each other, and where the hard boundaries are. You work across product squads, TechOps, and programme leadership — but your authority is technical, not managerial. Teams here use AI-assisted development workflows daily, including LLM/agentic-AI tooling for spec building, code generation, and test automation. You are expected to push the boundaries of what's possible with these tools. Architecture & technical direction Set the overall system architecture for the TradeNet platform — service decomposition, data architecture, API contracts, infrastructure patterns. Make binding technical decisions across teams. Resolve cross-squad technical disputes. Own the architecture decision record. Design for resilience: fault isolation, blast-radius…