Vice President, Chief Architect

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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