Senior Software Engineer, Digital Platform

About Us

SPH Media’s mission is to be the trusted source of news and lifestyle content in Singapore and Asia. 

One of our core purposes is to produce credible, balanced, and objective news and analysis, always with a view to uphold the public good and fostering an informed, engaged citizenry.

We welcome talented individuals to join us and grow a career in a vibrant and collaborative environment built around a culture of respect and inclusivity.

As an employer, we are committed to rewarding our people fairly and developing them in their careers. 

About the Role

We're looking for a senior engineer to set the technical direction for one of the shared platforms behind SPH Media's publications: web hosting for sites like The Straits Times, content APIs and search, or the company's AI platform. You'll lead the design, make the trade-offs, and live with them in production. We build mostly in TypeScript, Python and Rust on AWS. Coding agents are part of daily work, so how you design matters more than which languages you know.

Where you'll work

SPH Media publishes The Straits Times, The Business Times, Lianhe Zaobao, Berita Harian, Tamil Murasu and other news, business, lifestyle and tech brands in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil, across websites, apps, newsletters and radio. Most Singaporeans read at least one of our titles every week, and our sites serve hundreds of millions of page views a month. Traffic can multiply within minutes when news breaks.

• Web platform: hosting, edge and caching for our sites and apps.

• Content platform: the APIs, search and pipelines that store, index and deliver our content to products across the company.

• AI platform: shared services that give teams across the company governed access to models, agents and internal knowledge.

You'll own one of these areas and shape designs that span all three.

What you'll do

• Work directly with the people you build for. Our users are product, editorial and commercial teams, and the readers behind them. Talk to them, understand the problem, and help decide what to build as well as how. Engineering, product and design increasingly overlap here, and you'll often be the one who decides what gets built.

• Design for change. Choose the simplest design that will hold up, keep it well tested and easy for others to modify, and record the decisions that matter in lightweight RFCs.

• Keep it fast, reliable and efficient in production. Readers notice when the news is slow or doesn't load, and wasted compute costs money. Set and meet performance and reliability targets, plan for failures and traffic spikes, keep cloud and model costs in check, and look after what you ship together with the team.

• Build with AI, and own the result. Coding agents running on frontier models are part of how we work. Give them good context, break work into the right pieces, and be able to explain and defend every change you merge.

• Lead across teams. Our systems depend on each other. Spot problems that span them, propose the fix, and bring other teams along.

• Review and mentor. Review code and designs, mentor engineers, and set the example for how the team works with coding agents.

Job Requirements

You'll do well here if you

• Have been the technical lead on a system that other engineers or teams built on: you set its direction, defended the trade-offs, and changed course when you were wrong.

• Have kept a high-traffic or business-critical system reliable: you've defined what "reliable" meant for it, led incident reviews, and fixed the causes.

• Have deep production experience in at least one of high-traffic web delivery, distributed data/search systems, or LLM-backed systems, and are comfortable working alongside the other two.

• Notice when an abstraction is wrong, an API is awkward or a dependency is unnecessary, and can make the case clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike. You prefer the simplest design that will last.

• Have shaped what got built: you've worked with users or stakeholders to understand a problem and changed the plan because of what you learned.

• Have changed how you or your team works because of AI coding tools, and can say specifically where they still fail and what you do about it.

• Typically have 8+ years of experience building and running production systems.
  

Tech we use: TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Rust, AWS, Terraform, React (SSR/ISR), CDN & edge compute, OpenSearch, LLMs, RAG, MCP.