Product Engineer - Giant Robots Labs

About the company

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.

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!

Your tasks

[What you will be working on] Giant Robots Labs is the experimental technology labs team within GovTech’s Government Technology Office. We turn ambitious ideas into working products quickly, test them with real users, and operate promising products through prototype and limited-beta stages. We also experiment with new technologies, new ways of working, and new models for how small teams can build and validate meaningful products.

As a Product Engineer, you will own products end to end. You will take an ambiguous problem, understand what users actually need, decide what should be built, design how it should work, build the necessary software and technical capabilities, deploy it, and validate it with real users.

The technical work will vary significantly between products. One product may require excellent user experience and interaction design. Another may involve complex integrations, infrastructure, real-time systems or distributed services. Another may depend on foundation models, multimodal AI, model evaluation, retrieval, agents or specialised machine learning.

You will continue iterating until the product has reached a natural stopping point (e.g. real-world data invalidated the hypothesis that this product concept was testing), integrated into an existing platform, handed over for broader productisation, or evolves into something larger.

AI agents are also a core part of how we work. We expect engineers to make effective use of modern agentic development tools, and to design products that can be safely accessed by both people and agents through appropriate interfaces, APIs and tools.

What you’ll do

• Turn ambiguous government problems into useful products that people can test and use
• Work directly with users and stakeholders to understand workflows, constraints and underlying needs
• Decide what to build, reduce problems to sensible first versions, and iterate based on real-world usage and evidence
• Build complete products across frontend, backend, data, APIs, integrations, infrastructure and cloud deployment as required
• Make practical decisions about product experience, interaction design, accessibility and visual quality
• Design systems that are secure, observable, maintainable and appropriate for operation beyond a one-off demonstration
• Integrate with GovTech’s existing products, platforms, identity systems, data infrastructure and shared capabilities where appropriate
• Build technical capabilities such as APIs, services, data pipelines, real-time systems, agent runtimes or reusable platforms when the product requires them
• Apply AI where it meaningfully improves the product, from integrating existing models and APIs to deeper model experimentation, adaptation and evaluation where necessary
• Select suitable models and techniques based on the task, available evidence, operational constraints, latency and cost
• Design evaluations, representative test cases, baselines and failure analyses for AI systems when model behaviour is important to product quality
• Investigate failures across software, infrastructure and AI components and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, reliability, security, quality and extensibility
• Design reusable and interoperable capabilities through APIs, structured data, events and agent-native tool interfaces
• Deploy and operate products through limited beta, including monitoring, user support, issue resolution, reliability, quality, latency, usage and cost management
• Prepare successful products for continued operation, integration into the wider GovTech ecosystem, or handover to another team

Requirements

You are not expected to be equally specialised in every area. What matters is that you have basic proficiency in engineering, design, and product, with substantial depth in one or more areas, and the ability to learn and work across boundaries to deliver the complete product.

You’ll thrive here if

• You enjoy owning a problem rather than receiving a fully specified backlog
• You want to build complete products rather than work indefinitely on one narrow component
• You care about whether something is useful to users, technically sound and operationally sustainable
• You are comfortable moving across unfamiliar parts of the stack when the product requires it
• You have strong depth somewhere, but do not define yourself solely by one technology, framework or engineering discipline
• You can move between speaking with users, making product decisions, designing systems and writing code
• You know when something needs to be polished and when a rough solution is sufficient to test an assumption
• You prefer simple architectures until additional complexity is justified
• You care about making systems understandable, observable and debuggable
• You are comfortable experimenting with emerging technologies while being willing to abandon approaches that do not work
• You look for opportunities to reuse and connect existing capabilities rather than automatically creating new standalone systems
• You take responsibility for what happens after a product reaches users
• You are energised by lean teams, broad ownership, high agency and rapidly changing problem spaces

[What we are looking for] We are looking for strong engineers rather than a single fixed technical profile.

You should have

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and substantial experience building working software
• Proficiency in one or more languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go or equivalent
• Experience taking substantial products, prototypes or technical systems from idea to working implementation
• Ability to work across multiple parts of a product stack, which may include frontend, backend, databases, APIs, infrastructure, integrations or deployment
• Good technical judgement and the ability to choose an appropriate level of engineering rigour for the stage of the product
• Ability to deploy, monitor, debug and operate software in a cloud or production-like environment
• Understanding of authentication, authorisation, secure data handling and production-aware engineering
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Fluency with agentic development tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor or equivalent tools
• A track record demonstrating substantial personal ownership, curiosity and high agency

We care more about whether you can take ownership of difficult problems and build useful, working products than whether your background fits a particular engineering label.

What we offer

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.

• Broad ownership from initial problem exploration through deployment and beta operation
• Direct access to users, stakeholders and decision-makers
• A wide variety of technical and product problems rather than a fixed technology domain
• Opportunities to work deeply in your areas of strength while expanding into unfamiliar ones
• Room to experiment with emerging technology, including but not limited to AI
• Opportunities to originate ideas, test hypotheses and shape the direction of successful products
• The chance to create reusable capabilities that may eventually support multiple GovTech products and teams
• A hands-on environment where leadership comes through judgement, initiative, working systems and demonstrated impact
• A role where product judgement and engineering ability are valued together

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.

Other

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.