Data Scientist, AI Innovation (AI Practice)

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.

About the Team

The AI Innovation team is part of GovTech's AI Practice. We stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence research and help product teams adopt cutting-edge technologies to improve operational outcomes across government and deliver tech for public good.

What You'll Do

As a Data Scientist in the AI Innovation team, you will:

• Project/product scoping

: Identify and prioritise opportunities for high-impact and technically challenging application of AI to transform strategic domains and functions across the Government. You will also need to scope out AI projects/products with clear deliverables through conversations with relevant stakeholders.

• Project delivery/product development

: Drive AI transformation in the selected problem spaces by identifying and researching relevant AI techniques, conduct experiments, and deliver sound solutions through proof-of-concepts. You will also need to collaborate with relevant stakeholders and engineering teams to ensure seamless transition of successful prototypes into production-ready solutions.

• Knowledge sharing

: Share knowledge of emerging or advanced AI techniques and how they are applied in real-world use cases. You will share such knowledge to the whole-of-government AI community through avenues such as presentations, technical workshops, and blog posts.

• Examples of ongoing projects/products include working with the Cyber Security Group to develop an AI-assisted penetration-testing system, and working with the Responsible AI team to develop context-aware, automated approach to LLM safety testing.

What We're Looking For

Essential Requirements

• Practical Experience

: Proven track record applying data science, machine learning and AI to solve real-world problems

• Technical Proficiency

: Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or Rust, with willingness to learn additional languages

• AI Expertise

: Deep understanding of:

• Traditional ML algorithms (e.g. logistic regression, random forests)

• Deep learning techniques (e.g. RNN, LSTM)

• Open-source LLM architectures (GPT-OSS, Llama, Gemma, Deepseek),

and a strong technical intuition to learn and adapt new concepts in AI to tangible outcomes.

Preferred Experience

• Frameworks

: PyTorch, TensorFlow, vLLM, HuggingFace Transformers, Text-Generation Inference

• Generative AI

: Prompt engineering, RAG, LLM fine-tuning, agentic AI applications

• Research Methods

: Experimental design, preprocessing, model selection and evaluation

What Does It Take to Succeed in This Role

Taking Ownership

You must be comfortable with working independently and setting your own direction to achieve your projects’ goals. This will often require you to be deeply involved end-to-end, from engaging potential users to identify their problem statements, performing the technical work to develop the prototype, engaging users iteratively to refine it, and presenting the final outcome to key stakeholders. While this role is highly hands-on and technical, it is NOT a pure engineering role with explicit technical requirements laid out for you to implement. Though you will not work alone, you are expected to tackle open-ended problems in AI that require you to get involved at all stages of implementation.

Willingness to Learn

You must be passionate about learning new things in this rapidly-changing field of Artificial Intelligence. In this role, you need to be co