Chief Software Architect

Senior/Staff Software Architect (Hands-on | B2B Fresh Food Supply Chain)

Location: The JTC Summit, 8 Jurong Town Hall Road, #18-06,Singapore 609434

Business Focus: B2B fresh food supply chain, F&B merchant ordering platform, supply chain fulfillment

Role Type: Hands-on architecture role — you'll be writing and shipping critical code, not just producing diagrams

About the Role

FoodMax is scaling from thousands of daily orders toward 10,000+ daily orders, alongside growing complexity across multiple suppliers, multiple warehouses, multi-temperature-zone storage, inventory, picking, delivery, and settlement.

You'll identify the key architectural risks in our current systems, design and drive an incremental evolution roadmap, and personally build out critical modules — safeguarding system stability, data consistency, and engineering velocity as order volume scales.

We're not looking for a consultant-style architect who only produces diagrams and review comments. We need a hands-on architect who owns the full loop — from problem identification and solution design to hands-on implementation and post-launch validation.

What You'll Do

1. Business Architecture & Domain Modeling

• Deeply understand FoodMax's order, product, pricing, inventory, procurement, warehousing, picking, delivery, after-sales, and merchant settlement flows.
• Define core domain objects, boundaries, and state machines, with a focus on order splitting, inventory consistency, fulfillment coordination, and exception compensation.
• Design scalable, practical system models tailored to fresh food's unique challenges — high-frequency procurement, tight time windows, non-standard/variable-weight items, stockouts, and loss sensitivity.
• Set the technical roadmap for evolving toward 10,000+ daily orders, multi-warehouse operations, and platformization.
• Favor incremental, gradual-rollout, observable, and reversible changes over over-engineering beyond current scale.

2. Core System Evolution & Hands-on Delivery

• Dig into existing code and data flows to identify performance, stability, consistency, and maintainability risks.
• Personally design and build critical modules, technical prototypes, and shared infrastructure.
• Drive idempotency, retry, compensation, reconciliation, and exception-recovery mechanisms across order, inventory, and fulfillment pipelines.
• Plan and lead incremental modernization of legacy systems — rewrite-from-scratch should never be the default.
• Own architecture initiatives end-to-end: design, review, implementation, and production outcomes — not just documentation.

3. Stability & Capacity Management

• Build capacity models for core pipelines, identifying risks around order-cutoff peaks, batch jobs, message backlogs, database hotspots, and external dependencies.
• Establish SLOs, full-chain monitoring, distributed tracing, alerting, and incident diagnosis for core systems.
• Drive adoption of rate limiting, graceful degradation, circuit breaking, disaster recovery, backups, and chaos/failure drills.
• Establish canary releases, fast rollback, and risk controls for major changes.
• Continuously reduce incident rate and MTTR, improving prevention and recovery for critical outages.

4. Architecture Governance & Team Enablement

• Build a lightweight, effective architecture review and technical decision-record process.
• Guide engineering teams on module decomposition, interface design, data modeling, and complex refactoring.
• Identify boundaries between shared capabilities and business capabilities to avoid duplicate builds and unmanaged microservice sprawl.
• Set technical standards and engineering quality bars, and drive adoption across the team.
• Partner with Product, Supply Chain, Procurement, Warehouse, Logistics, and Finance to shape business solutions, translating technical trade-offs into business language.

5. AI-Native Engineering Practices

• Use AI coding tools to accelerate legacy code comprehension, validate architecture decisions, generate tests, refactor, and support code review.
• Establish quality guardrails for AI-generated code, with particular attention to concurrency, consistency, security, and maintainability risks.
• Drive testing, static analysis, code review, CI, and observability practices — never trading stability for short-term delivery speed.
• Help the team build a culture where AI accelerates delivery, engineering discipline protects quality.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated ability.
• 8+ years of software development experience, including 3+ years in architecture, core system ownership, or technical leadership.
• Strong hands-on coding ability — genuinely willing to stay hands-on, not just produce plans and reviews.
• Track record of leading at least one core system evolution, major refactor, data migration, or stability initiative, with measurable before/after results.

Architecture & Engineering

• Strong complex business-domain modeling skills — able to extract core objects, states, boundaries, and invariants from business rules.
• Solid grasp of idempotency, consistency, state machines, reliable messaging, and exception compensation in order, inventory, payment, settlement, or fulfillment contexts.
• Deep familiarity with relational databases, caching, message queues, service governance, and observability stacks.
• Skilled in capacity planning, performance analysis, incident diagnosis, disaster recovery, and degradation strategies.
• Pragmatic judgment to match solutions to actual business scale — avoiding unnecessary distributed complexity and over-engineering.
• Understands DDD principles and applies them thoughtfully, without mechanically forcing concepts, layers, or terminology.
• Comfortable reading and modifying existing code, and building out critical code paths, prototypes, and shared infrastructure.

AI-Assisted Development

• Extensive hands-on use of modern AI coding tools for code comprehension, solution validation, test generation, refactoring, and code review.
• Able to spot risks in AI-generated code around business logic boundaries, concurrency safety, data consistency, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Uses automated testing and engineering quality gates to validate AI-generated output rather than accepting it at face value.
• Practical experience using AI to boost team productivity or establish AI development standards.

Communication & Execution

• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills — able to explain technical solutions to business stakeholders in plain language.
• Able to make clear trade-offs amid rapid business change, legacy constraints, and delivery pressure.
• Strong problem decomposition, project-driving ability, and ownership of outcomes.
• Intellectually curious, with the ability to quickly pick up new business domains, tools, and engineering practices.

Nice to Have

• Experience in B2B e-commerce, fresh food/perishable supply chain, multi-warehouse inventory, logistics fulfillment, or merchant platforms.
• Experience scaling order volume, expanding across multiple warehouses, platformizing a business, or incrementally modernizing a monolith.
• Experience handling production incidents, running failure drills, and building stability practices.
• Experience with non-standard/variable-weight items, stockout substitution, partial fulfillment, refund compensation, or supplier settlement.
• Experience with Singapore or Southeast Asian supply chain / e-commerce systems.
• Bilingual in English and Mandarin for cross-team communication.