Data Innovation Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a Digital Innovation Engineer to join our Digital Solution & Technology team in Singapore.

This role will hands-on engineering focused on rapidly turning business problems into practical, secure and production-ready digital solutions.

The role will work across software engineering, workflow automation, innovative applications, data integration and rapid prototyping. Unlike a traditional research-focused innovation role, this position requires strong experience in enterprise application development, system enhancement, API integration, database development, production support and secure software delivery.

The successful candidate should be comfortable taking a business problem, understanding the operational workflow, proposing practical solution options and delivering a working solution within a few iterations.

The role will work closely with our Business Analysts, Project Manager, Infrastructure & Security team and Core Platforms Engineering team in Malaysia.

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Key Responsibilities

Digital Solution Development

• Design, develop and enhance internal and internal digital applications.
• Build lightweight applications, APIs, automation tools and workflow solutions that address operational and business requirements.
• Rapidly develop Proof-of-Concepts and Minimum Viable Products and subsequently productionise successful solutions.
• Identify opportunities where smaller standalone applications or automation can solve business problems faster than modifying large core systems.
• Balance speed of delivery with maintainability, security and system reliability.

Hands-on Software Engineering

• Remain actively involved in application design, coding, testing, troubleshooting and enhancement.
• Review existing applications and recommend practical improvements to architecture, performance and maintainability.
• Develop and consume REST APIs and other integration interfaces.
• Work with relational databases, stored procedures, queries and data integrations.
• Troubleshoot application, integration and database issues across multiple systems.
• Perform code reviews and establish good engineering practices for new digital solutions.

Innovation & Automation

• Develop AI-enabled business applications using commercially available or enterprise-approved AI/LLM technologies.
• Build solutions involving document extraction, information retrieval, summarisation, classification, workflow automation and intelligent assistants.
• Evaluate when AI is appropriate and when conventional application development or automation provides a simpler solution.
• Build and integrate LLM, API and agent-based solutions where there is a valid business requirement.
• Ensure innovated solutions comply with internal cybersecurity, data privacy and information-governance requirements.

Rapid Innovation & Prototyping

• Work directly with business stakeholders to understand problems rather than simply implementing predefined technical specifications.
• Translate business workflows into technical solutions.
• Develop rapid prototypes to validate feasibility and business value before committing to large-scale implementation.
• Provide solution options with clear trade-offs in terms of effort, cost, risk, security and user experience.
• Challenge unnecessary technical complexity and recommend the simplest sustainable solution.

Production Engineering

• Ensure new applications can operate reliably in a production environment.
• Implement appropriate logging, monitoring, authentication, error handling and auditability.
• Follow proper version control, testing and deployment practices.
• Participate in root-cause analysis for production issues relating to applications developed by the Digital Innovation Engineering team.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Work closely with the Project Manager and Business Analysts to translate requirements into deliverable solutions.
• Collaborate with the Malaysia Core Platforms Engineering team where innovation solutions need to integrate with existing enterprise applications.
• Work with Infrastructure & Security teams to ensure new solutions meet cybersecurity and cloud standards.
• Work with vendors and external technology partners where specialist capabilities are required.
• Explain technical options to both technical and non-technical stakeholders clearly.

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Requirements

Experience

• Minimum 7–8 years of hands-on software engineering experience, with substantial involvement in coding, application enhancement and production system development.
• Strong track record of independently designing, developing and delivering enterprise applications.
• Experience taking applications from requirement through development, testing, deployment and production support.
• Demonstrated experience improving or modernising existing applications, rather than working only on greenfield projects.
• Experience working in environments with real business users, production incidents, deadlines and change-control requirements.