# Staff Database Data Engineer, TradeNet **Company**: Government Technology Agency (GovTech) **Location**: Singapore **Experience**: staff **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/govtech/jobs/4007717201?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_5a60fc24-4bb ## 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. 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. 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. ## Responsibilities ### Legacy Data Migration - Own the migration of legacy production data end to end: extraction, transformation, loading, reconciliation, and cutover. - 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 - 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. ## Requirements - 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. - 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. ## 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 that shape architecture (data residency, classification, audit trails). ## Benefits 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. ## Skills ### Required - Database Engineering - DBA - Oracle - PostgreSQL - Migration - Reconciliation - Performance Tuning - Backup and Recovery - High Availability - Disaster Recovery - Schema Change - Security - Governance - SQL - Python - Bash - AWS ### Nice to have - Singapore government technology ecosystem - Trade - Customs - Regulatory - Financial platform engineering - Data-governance - Compliance constraints --- Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/govtech/jobs/4007717201?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)