Deputy Director, Payroll & HRMS Engineering

About the Company

BIPO is building the next generation of AI-native HR and payroll technology across Asia Pacific and beyond.

About the Role

The Deputy Director, Payroll & HRMS Engineering leads the engineering teams responsible for BIPO's payroll engine (26+ countries with full statutory compliance) and HRMS platform (HRMS V2), spanning core product delivery, platform reliability, and the integration of AI capabilities into the engineering lifecycle and the product itself. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will own delivery outcomes, raise engineering standards, and drive the adoption of AI-assisted development across your teams — while keeping a compliance-critical, multi-country payroll system accurate, secure, and on time every cycle.

Responsibilities

Delivery & Product Engineering

• Own end-to-end engineering delivery for the payroll engine and HRMS V2, including new country launches, statutory compliance updates, and major module releases (e.g., appraisal, rostering, casual labor)
• Partner with Product Management on roadmap planning, scoping, and trade-off decisions; commit to and hit delivery timelines with predictable quality
• Ensure statutory and regulatory changes across supported markets are implemented accurately and ahead of effective dates

AI-Native Engineering

• Drive full adoption of AI-assisted coding across the teams, including agent-driven development workflows; own efficiency and quality metrics for the transition
• Embed AI into engineering operations — automated testing, QA augmentation, documentation, release processes
• Collaborate with the AI platform team on productizing AI features within payroll and HRMS (e.g., pre-payroll validation, post-payroll anomaly detection, payslip assistant)

Platform, Quality & Compliance

• Maintain platform reliability, performance, and security standards for compliance-critical workloads; support SOC1/SOC2 audit readiness
• Reduce technical debt deliberately; enforce architectural boundaries between core product and client-specific work (in partnership with the FDE function)
• Establish and track engineering quality metrics: defect rates, cycle time, payroll accuracy incidents

Leadership & Organization

• Lead, coach, and grow a multi-team engineering organization across [Singapore / China / Vietnam / other locations]
• Build a culture of ownership, technical rigor, and continuous improvement; run effective planning, review, and incident-response practices
• Recruit and develop senior engineering talent; plan succession and capability depth for critical systems

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years leading multi-team engineering organizations (15–40+ engineers)
• Proven delivery ownership of complex, compliance-critical enterprise systems — payroll, HRMS, fintech, banking, or similar domains strongly preferred
• Deep understanding of multi-country / multi-tenant SaaS architecture, data security, and regulatory compliance requirements
• Demonstrated adoption of AI-assisted development at team or org level; strong point of view on how AI changes engineering practice
• Track record of balancing delivery speed with quality on systems where errors have direct financial and legal consequences
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with Product, Service Delivery, and client-facing teams
• Excellent communication in English; Mandarin an advantage given regional team footprint

Preferred Skills

• Direct experience with payroll engines, statutory compliance implementations, or HR system-of-record platforms in APAC markets
• Experience with agentic AI architectures, MCP-based integrations, or LLM-powered product features
• Experience supporting SOC1/SOC2 or equivalent audit processes