Staff-level database engineer for TradeNet, Singapore's national trade-permit platform. Owns the Oracle-to-PostgreSQL legacy data migration end to end, plus performance tuning, HA/DR and on-call operations, schema governance, and standards-setting. Core tech: Oracle, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS/Aurora, CDC tooling, Python/Bash.
Compensation
Not disclosed
Location
Singapore
Work setup
Not specified
Seniority
Staff
Employment
Contract
Experience
9+ years
Category
Data engineering
Posted
Skills
agentic-ai
agile
ai
aurora
automation
aws
bash
cloud
cloud-native
cybersecurity
data-governance
data-science
llm
observability
oracle
postgresql
python
rds
root-cause-analysis
sql
test-automation
Must have
9+ years hands-on database engineering or DBA experience on production systems with real transaction volume
Track record migrating large production datasets off legacy platforms, including reconciliation, phased cutover, and rollback planning
Operational depth: backup/recovery with tested restores and PITR, HA, failover, monitoring, incident response as first responder
Ability to reconstruct business logic from legacy database artefacts (stored procedures, triggers, constraints)
Strong SQL plus comfort with application code and ORMs
Experience with CDC and replication tooling such as Golden Gate, AWS DMS, or logical replication
Experience running databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora)
Scripting ability for automation in Python, Bash, or similar
Practical experience with database security and compliance controls: roles/privileges, encryption, masking, audit logging
Strong written technical communication (migration plans, runbooks, incident write-ups)
Nice to have
Experience in Singapore government technology ecosystem (GovTech, SGTS, IM8/CSA frameworks)
Background in trade, customs, regulatory, or financial platform engineering
Experience with data-governance and compliance constraints (data residency, classification, audit trails)
Full description
The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) is the lead agency driving Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives and public sector digital transformation. As the Centre of Excellence for Infocomm Technology and Smart Systems (ICT & SS), GovTech develops the Singapore Government’s capabilities in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, Application Development, Smart City Technology, Digital Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity.
At GovTech, we offer you a purposeful career to make lives better. We empower our people to master their craft through continuous and robust learning and development opportunities all year round. Our GovTechies embody our Agile, Bold and Collaborative values to deliver impactful solutions.
GovTech aims to transform the delivery of Government digital services by taking an "outside-in" view, putting citizens and businesses at the heart of everything we do. Play a part in Singapore’s vision to build a Smart Nation and embark on your meaningful journey to build tech for public good.
Join us to advance our mission and shape your future with us today!
Learn more about GovTech at tech.gov.sg
TradeNet is Singapore's National Single Window for trade permit processing. It handles over 9 million permit applications annually and accounts for around 10% of national tax revenues. We are replacing the decades-old legacy system with a modern, cloud-native platform.
The database work is the sharp end of this programme. Years of permit history, reference data, and business rules sit in legacy tables and stored procedures that were never fully documented. All of it has to move — correctly, provably, and without an outage window that agencies or traders would notice. Once it has moved, it has to hold up under sustained volume with clearing deadlines that don't wait for a slow query.
You are the person the programme relies on for this. You own the migration approach, the operational health of the estate, and the standards squads follow when they touch data.
Teams here use AI-assisted development workflows daily, including LLM/agentic-AI tooling for spec building, code generation, and test automation. You are expected to push the boundaries of what's possible with these tools.
[What you will be working on]Legacy Data Migration
- Own the migration of legacy production data end to end: extraction, transformation, loading, reconciliation, and cutover. You write and run the scripts, not only the plan.
- Build the reconciliation tooling that proves the migrated data is correct — row counts, financial sums, referential integrity, and business invariants checked on both sides.
- Design and execute phased cutovers using dual-write, backfill, and shadow-read approaches, with a rollback path you have rehearsed.
- Work out what legacy data means before you move it, by reading stored procedures, triggers, constraints, and the table relationships nobody wrote down.
- Execute complex phased cutovers using a 'Co-existence' model for user cohorts, prioritizing batch-based migration over integrated strangler patterns to minimize legacy dependency risks.
- Perform detective work to reverse-engineer undocumented business logic from legacy Oracle stored procedures and triggers before migration.
Performance and Tuning
- Find and fix slow queries. Read execution plans, correct the bad ones, and tell the owning squad what to do differently next time.
- Own indexing across the estate: add what's needed, remove what isn't, and watch the write cost.
- Tune instance and server configuration — memory, work_mem, checkpoints, autovacuum, parallelism, connection limits.
- Diagnose contention under production load: lock waits, long-running and idle-in-transaction connections, deadlocks, hot rows.
- Own connection pooling and pool sizing, table and index bloat, vacuum strategy, and partitioning of large history tables.
- Do capacity planning and cost tuning. Right-size instances and storage instead of scaling up by reflex.
Database Operations and Reliability
- Own backup and recovery, including scheduled test restores and point-in-time recovery. Verifying that backups ran is not the same as knowing you can restore.
- Own high availability and disaster recovery: streaming replication, read-replica routing, lag monitoring, and failover drills you actually execute.
- Plan and run major and minor version upgrades with minimal downtime.
- Build observability for the data layer so problems surface before users report them — slow queries, replication lag, bloat and vacuum health, pool saturation.
- Take part in on-call for database incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and publish the written follow-up.
Schema, security, and governance
- Review and approve schema changes and migrations from squads before they reach production, especially on shared and high-volume tables.
- Run schema change safely against live traffic: online index builds, non-blocking DDL, throttled backfills, expand-contract patterns for column changes.
- Own access control and least-privilege roles across environments, encryption at rest and in transit, credential rotation, and secrets handling.
- Implement data classification, masking, and anonymisation for non-production environments.
Technical leadership (without headcount)
- Set the programme's standards for migration safety, schema change, performance, and operational hygiene, and build the tooling that makes those standards easy to follow.
- Make the trade-off between data integrity and delivery timelines explicit and visible. Some shortcuts are acceptable; some data damage cannot be undone, and you are the one who says so.
- Advise application engineers on transaction boundaries, isolation levels, idempotency, retry behaviour, and ORM patterns that generate poor SQL.
[What we are looking for]
- At least 9 years of hands-on database engineering or DBA experience on production systems with real transaction volume and real consequences for downtime.
- Deep Oracle expertise: query tuning and execution plans, indexing, partitioning, vacuum and bloat management, replication, connection pooling, configuration tuning.
- Experience with PostgreSQL as a target architecture, including schema transformation, PL/pgSQL conversion, and heterogeneous replication (Oracle to Postgres).
- A track record migrating large production datasets off legacy platforms, including reconciliation, phased cutover, and rollback planning where losing data is not an acceptable outcome. You've done this before and know where it goes wrong.
- Strong operational depth: backup and recovery with tested restores and PITR, high availability, failover, monitoring, and incident response as first responder.
- Ability to reconstruct business logic from legacy database artefacts: stored procedures, triggers, constraints, undocumented relationships.
- Strong SQL, plus comfort with application code and ORMs to debug across.
- Experience with CDC and replication tooling such as Golden Gate, AWS DMS, or logical replication.
- Experience running databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora).
- Scripting ability for automation in Python, Bash, or similar.
- Practical experience with database security and compliance controls: roles and privileges, encryption, masking, audit logging.
- Strong written technical communication. Your migration plans, runbooks, and incident write-ups need to stand on their own and be executable without you in the room.
Good to have
- Experience in Singapore government technology ecosystem (GovTech, SGTS, IM8/CSA frameworks).
- Background in trade, customs, regulatory, or financial platform engineering.
- Experience with data-governance and compliance constraints that shape architecture (data residency, classification, audit trails).
What we offer you:
GovTech is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive workplace that values diverse voices and perspectives, as we believe that diversity is the foundation to innovation.
Our employee benefits are based on a total rewards approach, offering a holistic and market-competitive suite of perks. These include leave benefits to meet your work-life needs and employee wellness programs.
We champion flexible work arrangements (subject to your job role) and trust that you will manage your own time to deliver your best, wherever you are, and whatever works best for you.
Learn more about life inside GovTech at go.gov.sg/GovTechCareers. Stay connected with us on social media at go.gov.sg/ConnectWithGovTech