Staff/ Senior Data Scientist, Multimodal AI, AI Practice
Senior/lead data scientist in GovTech's AI Practice running hands-on experiments with frontier multimodal models (VLMs, diffusion, speech/audio), building evaluations, benchmarks, and prototypes for Singapore government agencies, and serving as technical liaison. Core tech spans computer vision, generative AI, LoRA fine-tuning, GPU cost trade-offs, and GCP/AWS.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Singapore
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field
- 5+ years applied ML/data science with meaningful depth in at least one non-text modality (computer vision, video understanding, audio/speech, or generative image/video)
- Solid understanding of ML fundamentals, including model training, evaluation methodology, and experiment design; comfort with sampling, uncertainty, and metric selection is a strong plus
- Foundational knowledge of computer vision concepts and/or hands-on experience working with image, video, or audio data
- Exposure to multimodal AI systems, vision-language models, and generative AI, including fine-tuning (e.g. LoRA) and synthetic data generation
- Practical sense for running models: GPU/VRAM constraints, open-weight vs commercial API trade-offs, and cost implications
- Working knowledge of cloud solution architecture on GCP and/or AWS — able to structure prototypes using managed compute, storage, and model-serving services
- Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex)
- Treats AI as a collaborator and re-tests frontier model capability first-hand
- Curious and outcome-oriented
- Comfortable with ambiguity, multiple parallel workstreams, and prototypes that may not ship
- Comfortable leading a small team of junior data scientists, setting technical direction and growing capability
- Strong communicator able to explain work to technical peers and non-technical agency stakeholders
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.
What you will be working on
AI Practice is the AI R&D and capability development arm of GovTech's Government Technology Office (GTO). As a Senior Data Scientist (Multimodal AI) on the Multimodal AI Squad, your work will span two broad areas:
Frontier Exploration and Evaluation
Systematically scanning, experimenting with, and interpreting the latest AI developments across vision, video, audio, and document modalities. This includes producing fast-response technical explorations when meaningful new capabilities emerge, as well as deeper assessments of maturing areas. The emphasis is on getting your hands dirty. This is empirical work, not editorial.
Agency Engagement and Transformation
Translating frontier AI capabilities into real outcomes for government agencies. The squad builds AI capabilities through rapid experimentation and works with agencies to identify and test promising capabilities against their own data and use cases, with viable solutions graduating onward for productisation. You will support the journey from discovery through experimentation and prototyping, often as the squad's technical point of contact with an agency.
Day to day, you can expect to:
- Experiment with state-of-the-art multimodal models (VLMs, MLLMs, diffusion models, speech and audio models) and evaluate their applicability to government use cases and strategy
- Design, build, and run evaluations and benchmarks for AI models on real-world Singapore government tasks — including constructing the underlying datasets, defining metrics and scoring, and standing behind results that inform agency and vendor decisions