Starry Recruitment Hiring! Full Time Technical Lead, Materials AI - Engineering in - Ricebowl

Technical Lead, Materials AI & Engineering

Location: Singapore

Work Arrangement: On-site

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Technical Lead to drive the technical strategy, architecture, and development of AI, data, and search platforms supporting materials R&D.

The role combines technical leadership, hands-on engineering, AI/search expertise, and team management, with a focus on building scalable and reliable data and AI systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Roadmap
• Define and execute technical roadmaps across data, search, AI, and backend systems.
• Assess existing architecture, identify gaps, and drive system improvements.
• Data & Search Engineering
• Lead work across data ingestion, parsing, normalization, knowledge modeling, indexing, and retrieval.
• Improve data quality, search relevance, coverage, freshness, performance, and scalability.
• Engineering Leadership
• Build and manage a multidisciplinary team across AI, Data, and Software Engineering.
• Lead hiring, performance management, career development, and technical mentoring.
• Establish engineering best practices and develop technical leaders.
• Production Engineering
• Drive best practices in system design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Improve system reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Evaluate and productionize AI/LLM-powered applications.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Partner with Product Managers and domain experts to translate business and customer needs into technical plans and engineering priorities.

Requirements

• Proven experience managing and developing engineering teams, including hiring, team building, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong track record of owning and executing technical roadmaps for complex, data-intensive products or platforms.
• Substantial experience with data platforms, data pipelines, search, information retrieval, or distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of backend architecture, databases, distributed systems, and APIs.
• Strong hands-on production engineering experience with Java, Go, Scala, Python, Rust, C++, or similar languages.
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to review code, evaluate technical decisions, and solve complex engineering problems.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Search Relevance, Hybrid Search, RAG, or LLM-powered applications.
• Experience with Document Intelligence, OCR, or structured information extraction.
• Experience with Ontologies, Entity Resolution, or Knowledge Graphs.
• Experience with scientific/technical data, materials science, chemistry, or patents.