Vice President Chief Architect

Chief Architect (Enterprise Platforms & Infrastructure)

CITO Transformation Office | Singapore Post

Design, Harden, and Own the Digital Backbone of National Logistics Infrastructure

Singapore Post is executing a clean-slate rebuild of its core technology platforms.

We are sunsetting legacy systems, collapsing unnecessary layers, and redesigning a production-grade digital backbone that must survive peak load, partial failure, regulatory scrutiny, and time.

This is not incremental modernization.

This is a foundational architectural reset.

We are hiring a Chief Architect to take end-to-end ownership of enterprise and platform architecture across the Group and to help define how SingPost builds, runs, and evolves technology for the next decade.

This is not an advisory role.

This is a hands-on, decision-making architecture leadership role.

What You Will Actually Architect (Infra-First, Failure-Driven)

This role is for architects who design systems from first principles, starting with networks, failure domains, and operational reality rather than frameworks or slides.

You will define and own:

System and Service Architecture

• Domain-aligned service boundaries with explicit ownership
• Clear isolation of failure domains and blast radius
• Microservices where they make sense, and deliberately not where they increase operational risk
• Coarser-grained services or monoliths where simplicity and reliability outweigh distribution

Integration and Eventing

• API-first integration with explicit versioning, compatibility, and deprecation discipline
• Event-driven systems designed with real constraints:
• Back-pressure and flow control
• Replay semantics and idempotency
• Ordering guarantees and when to drop them
• Poison message handling and dead-letter strategies
• Replacement of brittle point-to-point integrations with resilient patterns

Infrastructure and Runtime Primitives

• Container orchestration and scheduling behaviour
• Resource isolation, CPU and memory contention, and noisy-neighbour control
• Networking models including ingress/egress, east-west traffic, and L4 vs L7 trade-offs
• Load balancing, queuing, rate limiting, and circuit breaking
• Event streaming internals, partitioning strategies, and throughput vs latency trade-offs
• Secrets management, workload identity, and zero-trust enforcement

Your architecture will underpin systems handling ~ approximately 1 million items per day, across postal, logistics, e-commerce, and cross-border flows with spiky, unpredictable traffic patterns.

We Are Not Hiring Buzzwords. We Are Hiring Judgement.

We are not interested in labels such as “microservices,” “monolithic,” “headless,” or “cloud-native” unless you can clearly explain:

• Why that choice fits this system
• What it costs operationally
• How it fails
• How it recovers
• When you would reverse the decision

We expect you to understand:

• Why distributed systems fail in ways monoliths do not
• Why retries often amplify failure
• Why latency variance matters more than averages
• Why network partitions are not edge cases
• Why state placement is the hardest architectural decision

We value scar tissue, not pattern recall.

This Is Not a Diagram-Only Role

You will use C4, UML, sequence diagrams, and architecture decision records, but only as tools to explain real systems.

You are expected to:

• Reason comfortably at the code and protocol level
• Understand thread pools, async execution, blocking behaviour, and contention under load
• Reason about TCP behaviour, timeouts, retries, and head-of-line blocking
• Design for observability before failure:
• Metrics that expose saturation
• Logs that survive partial outages
• Traces that reflect causality, not noise
• Design systems that can be operated by humans who did not design them

You are not designing for elegance.

You are designing for survivability and operability.

Technical Bar and Assessment Process (Read Carefully)

This is a senior, hands-on Chief Architect role, and the technical bar is intentionally high.

We will assess real technical depth, not presentation skills or vocabulary.

Candidates should expect a rigorous process that includes:

• Structured technical assessments (e.g. HackerRank or equivalent) to test problem-solving ability, systems thinking, and reasoning under constraints
• Deep system, infrastructure, and failure-design interviews conducted by very senior, practicing architects
• Scenario-based discussions covering:
• Distributed systems failure modes
• Integration at the code and protocol level
• Throughput vs latency trade-offs
• Capacity planning and saturation
• Cloud vs on-prem vs hybrid decisions under real constraints
• Legacy decomposition while systems remain live

This is not a role you can wing.

If you are uncomfortable being tested on how systems actually behave in production, this role will not be a good fit.

Who This Role Is For

This role will naturally appeal to:

• Infra-heavy, SRE-leaning, or kernel/network-aware architects from hyperscalers
• Senior architects from banking, payments, telco, or regulated infrastructure with deep experience in resilience and risk

That said, we do not hire by logo.

If you have:

• Built and operated distributed systems under real load
• Designed infrastructure-aware architectures
• Lived through outages, migrations, and painful trade-off

…we strongly encourage you to apply.

What matters is what you have built and owned, not where you worked.

Growth and Leadership Exposure

The Chief Architect works closely with the CITO and senior leaders across build, run, data, and cyber.

This role provides direct exposure to enterprise-wide technology leadership and is well suited to senior architects who aspire to grow into CTO or CIO roles over time by owning real systems, real risk, and real outcomes.

Bottom Line

We are inclusive about where you come from.

We are uncompromising about technical depth, judgement, and operational credibility.

If you want to design systems that:

• Fail predictably
• Recover deliberately
• Scale under stress
• And can be operated by real humans in the real world

We would like to hear from you by applying with us.