Engineering & Operational Excellence Lead

Role Overview

StarHub is a major Singapore telecommunications and critical infrastructure provider that is expanding beyond traditional telecom into a cloud-led, AI-enabled digital platform business. The company delivers secure, intelligent, and dependable connectivity for millions of users.

In this position, you will help strengthen the digital backbone of the country, work across advanced platforms such as 5G, cloud, cybersecurity, and enterprise technology, and contribute within a culture that prizes speed, ownership, and innovation. The work spans multi-disciplinary collaboration and supports resilient services that matter to national life.

This position sits within Information Systems - Delivery & Business Enablement (DBE) TPM Lead and supports the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) team. As the Engineering & Operational Excellence Lead, you will help improve engineering and operational excellence across Information Systems.

You will act as the link between engineering, product, DevOps, and QA teams to make delivery more predictable, more resilient, more secure, and continuously better across backend platforms including APIs, integration services, and core services.

What You Will Do

This is a senior individual contributor role focused on engineering transformation, not a project coordination or project management position. You will work directly with Domain Owners and Engineering Managers to improve reliability, delivery predictability, quality, and operational maturity across teams.

Your remit includes setting engineering standards, adding systemic controls, and embedding DevSecOps and SRE approaches that produce measurable gains in platform health and delivery performance.

Performance in this role is judged by results rather than activity, with success reflected in stronger DORA metrics, fewer incidents, higher automation, and less manual operational effort.

Engineering and Operational Excellence

• Define and advance DORA targets such as deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.
• Reduce repetitive operational effort by increasing automation and introducing self-healing capabilities.
• Build stronger domain ownership and accountability within a domain-based operating model.

DevSecOps and Reliability Foundations

• Set up and standardize release-readiness practices for CI/CD across different domains.
• Introduce SRE concepts such as service level objectives, error budgets, and operating guardrails.
• Lift the maturity of observability, monitoring, detection, and alerting.

Transformation and Change Leadership

• Lead change across Engineering, QE, DevOps, Security, and Operations functions.
• Turn strategic priorities into practical roadmaps for improvement.
• Coach teams and leaders on modern engineering and operational methods.
• Drive ways of working that increase ownership, autonomy, and accountability.
• Move between planning and execution as needed to get things done.

Hands-on Enablement

• Take ownership of reliability improvement efforts.
• Build prototypes or pilot automation and tooling where adoption needs to be accelerated.
• Support rollout of operational and platform tools such as Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, CI/CD tooling, and observability stacks.

Qualifications

Education and Certifications

• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a similar discipline is required.
• Agile, PMP, or DevOps certifications such as CSM, SAFe, or PMI-ACP are preferred.

Experience

• At least 15 years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or engineering excellence roles.
• Proven success leading engineering or operational change at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to improve reliability, delivery speed, and operational efficiency with measurable outcomes.
• Experience working across several teams or domains in large, complex environments.
• Practical experience with cloud-native systems, CI/CD, and contemporary engineering practices.
• Background in digital platforms or large-scale mission-critical systems is an advantage.

Technical and Functional Skills

• Strong grasp of DevSecOps, SRE, and continuous delivery methods.
• Working knowledge of DORA metrics, incident handling, and operational health frameworks.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerized services, and microservices-based systems.
• Understanding of testing approaches, automation frameworks, and quality engineering practices.
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, GitLab/GitHub, Jenkins, and observability tools.

Leadership Traits

• Results-focused with strong systems thinking.
• Confident in challenging existing approaches using data and evidence.
• Persuasive communicator who can work effectively with both engineering and business stakeholders.
• Highly accountable, proactive, and comfortable with hands-on work.
• Practical operator who can shift smoothly between strategy and execution.

Success Measures

• Visible improvement in DORA outcomes and overall system reliability.
• Less manual operations work and fewer incident-driven interruptions.
• Consistent use of engineering standards across domains.
• Higher levels of automation.
• Stronger domain ownership and operational maturity.
• Engineering teams working with greater autonomy, predictability, and quality.