#HOT# Senior Systems Programmer / AI Engineer (Contract)
#HOT# Senior Systems Programmer / AI Engineer (Rolling Contract)
Location: Singapore Type: 12-month contract, renewable Style: Hybrid, with a highly flexible arrangement
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Senior Systems Programmer / AI Engineer to take technical ownership of complex, business-critical systems within a global technology organization.
This is a highly technical individual contributor role focused on AI-enabled engineering, large-scale software systems, evaluation infrastructure, system reliability and technical architecture .
The successful candidate will be expected to independently own technically complex problem spaces, make high-impact architectural decisions, build and operate production systems, and drive new technologies from experimentation through to hardened production.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the architecture, development and operation of complex production systems with organisation-wide impact
- Define technical strategy and make independent engineering decisions across ambiguous and technically challenging problem spaces
- Design and build AI evaluation, validation and experimentation infrastructure to assess the reliability, quality and safety of AI-generated outputs
- Develop and operate LLM, RAG, multi-agent or AI-assisted engineering systems in production environments
- Establish measurable quality gates, monitoring, experimentation and validation frameworks before AI systems are deployed
- Apply systems thinking across multiple services and engineering boundaries, identifying and resolving issues beyond direct ownership
- Drive scalability, performance, reliability and fault tolerance across distributed systems
- Evaluate emerging AI and software engineering techniques and take them from research or prototype through proof of concept and production
- Establish engineering standards around security, data protection, AI safety and production reliability
- Mentor senior engineers and help develop technical ownership and engineering judgment across the organization
- Produce technical documentation and architecture specifications detailed enough for other engineering teams to consume systems independently
Required Experience & Technical Skills
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience , including experience owning complex production systems
- Demonstrated experience as a Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer or equivalent technical leadership position
- Strong hands-on software engineering background with experience across backend, frontend, distributed systems or platform engineering
- Proven production experience with AI/ML, LLM, NLP, RAG, fine-tuning or multi-agent systems
- Practical experience designing AI evaluation, experimentation or validation frameworks , rather than only consuming third-party AI APIs
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, system architecture, scalability, observability and fault tolerance
- Strong programming capability in one or more of Python, PostgreSQL, Java, TypeScript or equivalent production languages
- Experience with modern cloud and data platforms such as AWS or Azure , together with technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, distributed databases or equivalent
- Experience designing and operating production systems through the full software lifecycle, including development, testing, deployment, monitoring and incident resolution
- Strong understanding of software security, data privacy and responsible AI principles
- Proven ability to make technical decisions where requirements are ambiguous and the consequences of failure are significant
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction beyond an individual's immediate area of ownership
Preferred Experience
The following would be highly advantageous:
- Experience building LLM evaluation or AI quality-assurance infrastructure
- Experience with fine-tuning, RAG, agentic systems, model evaluation or AI safety
- Experience developing AI-assisted engineering or autonomous software engineering systems
- Experience with PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, LangChain, MCP or comparable AI framework
- Experience with large-scale data processing using Kafka, Spark, Flink or MapReduce
- Experience designing cloud-native systems using AWS and/or Azure
- Experience taking emerging technologies from research or experimentation into hardened production environments
- Experience leading technical initiatives involving multiple engineering teams
What Makes This Role Different
This is not a conventional Senior Software Engineer position.
The successful candidate will be expected to own a technically difficult problem space end-to-end , rather than simply contribute code to an existing system.
You will have significant responsibility for:
AI Engineering × Distributed Systems × Technical Architecture × Evaluation Infrastructure × Production Reliability
The role offers the opportunity to work on technically challenging systems where engineering judgment, experimentation and long-term technical ownership are critical.
Please reach out to co.co@ambition.com.sg with your updated resume and contact details. Incomplete applications may not be considered /Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
Business Registration Number: 200611680D | License Number: 10C5117 | EA Registration Number: R1768258