Senior Software Engineer, Digital Platform

About the role

SPH Media, publisher of The Straits Times, The Business Times, Lianhe Zaobao and other news, business, lifestyle and tech brands, is looking for a senior engineer to set the technical direction for one of its shared digital platforms. The candidate will own either the web platform (hosting, edge and caching for sites and apps), the content platform (APIs, search and pipelines that store, index and deliver content), or the AI platform (shared services giving teams governed access to models, agents and internal knowledge). The work is mostly in TypeScript, Python and Rust on AWS, and coding agents are part of daily work.

Key responsibilities

• Work directly with product, editorial and commercial teams and readers to understand the problem and decide what to build and how.
• Design for change: choose simple, well-tested designs, record important decisions in lightweight RFCs, and keep systems fast, reliable and efficient in production.
• Set and meet performance and reliability targets, plan for failures and traffic spikes, and keep cloud and model costs in check.
• Build with AI coding agents, give them good context, break work into the right pieces and defend every change merged.
• Lead across teams by spotting cross-team problems and proposing fixes, and review code and designs while mentoring engineers.

Required profile

• Technical lead on a system, defending trade-offs and changing course when needed.
• Experience keeping a high-traffic or business-critical system reliable, including incident reviews.
• Deep production experience in at least one of high-traffic web delivery, distributed data/search systems or LLM-backed systems.
• Ability to argue against bad abstractions, APIs or dependencies, and to change plans based on user feedback.
• Experience adapting to AI coding tools and knowing where they still fall short.
• Typically 8+ years of experience building and running production systems.

Required skills

• TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Rust
• AWS, Terraform, React (SSR/ISR)
• CDN and edge compute, OpenSearch, LLMs, RAG, MCP