Description
Job Description
Singapore Post is undertaking a clean-slate transformation of its core technology platforms to build a resilient, production-grade digital backbone for national logistics infrastructure. This initiative goes beyond incremental modernization and represents a foundational architectural reset across enterprise platforms and infrastructure.We are seeking a Chief Architect to take end-to-end ownership of enterprise and platform architecture across the Group. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role responsible for defining how SingPost designs, builds, operates, and evolves technology over the next decade. The role is deeply technical, infra-first, and failure-driven, with direct accountability for real-world system behavior under load, failure, and regulatory scrutiny.
This is not an advisory or diagram-only role. The Chief Architect will make and own architectural decisions that underpin systems processing approximately 400,000 parcels per day, across postal, logistics, e-commerce, and cross-border operations with highly variable traffic patterns.
Enterprise and Platform Architecture Ownership
Define and own enterprise-wide system, service, and platform architecture across Singapore Post Group.
Establish domain-aligned service boundaries with clear ownership and accountability.
Design architectures that explicitly manage failure domains, blast radius, and operational risk.
Make deliberate, context-driven decisions on microservices, coarse-grained services, or monolithic architectures based on reliability, simplicity, and operability.
Integration and Event-Driven Design
Lead API-first integration strategies with explicit versioning, compatibility, and deprecation policies.
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Design and govern resilient event-driven systems, including:
Back-pressure and flow control mechanisms
Idempotency and replay semantics
Ordering guarantees and trade-offs
Poison message handling and dead-letter strategies
Replace brittle point-to-point integrations with robust, scalable integration patterns.
Infrastructure and Runtime Architecture
Architect container orchestration and workload scheduling behavior.
Design for resource isolation, CPU and memory contention, and noisy-neighbor mitigation.
Define networking models including ingress/egress, east-west traffic, and L4 vs L7 trade-offs.
Architect load balancing, queueing, rate limiting, and circuit-breaking strategies.
Define event streaming internals, partitioning strategies, and throughput vs latency trade-offs.
Lead secrets management, workload identity, and zero-trust security enforcement.
Failure-Driven and Operability-Focused Design
Design systems from first principles, starting with networks, failure modes, and operational realities.
Anticipate how systems fail, recover, and degrade under stress.
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Design observability into systems upfront, including:
Metrics that expose saturation and contention
Logs that remain usable during partial outages
Traces that reflect causality and system behavior
Ensure systems can be operated and maintained by teams who did not design them.
Hands-On Technical Leadership
Reason comfortably at code, protocol, and runtime levels.
Understand threading models, async execution, blocking behavior, and contention under load.
Reasons about TCP behavior, retries, timeouts, and head-of-line blocking.
Produce architecture decision records, system diagrams, and documentation to explain real, running systems.
Partner closely with build, run, data, and cyber teams to ensure architectural decisions translate into production outcomes.
Leadership and Stakeholder Engagement
Work closely with the CITO and senior leadership on enterprise-wide technology strategy.
Provide architectural leadership during legacy decomposition while systems remain live.
Influence technology standards, engineering practices, and long-term platform direction.
Requirements
Technical Expertise
Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems under real production load.
Deep understanding of infrastructure-aware architecture, including networks, compute, storage, and runtime behavior.
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Strong grasp of distributed systems failure modes, including:
Retry amplification
Latency variance vs averages
Network partitions
State placement and consistency trade-offs
Demonstrated ability to make architectural decisions based on operational cost, failure behavior, and recovery characteristics.
Architectural Judgement
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Ability to clearly articulate:
Why a specific architectural choice fits a given system
The operational and organizational costs of that choice
How the system fails and recovers
When and why decisions should be reversed
Preference for pragmatic, survivable systems over theoretical elegance or buzzword-driven design.
Experience Profile
Typically 15+ years of experience in software, platform, or infrastructure architecture roles.
Backgrounds may include hyperscalers, banking, payments, telecommunications, logistics, or other regulated, high-availability environments.
Prior experience leading large-scale platform or infrastructure transformations is strongly preferred.
Assessment Readiness
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Willingness to undergo a rigorous technical assessment process, including:
Structured problem-solving and systems-thinking evaluations
Deep technical interviews focused on infrastructure, failure modes, and real-world trade-offs
Scenario-based discussions covering capacity planning, cloud vs on-prem decisions, and live legacy migration