Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh
On-siteSingapore, Singapore
Job Summary
Define the multi-year technical strategy for the service mesh platform, including data plane and control plane evolution, and architect complex changes to Istio or Envoy infrastructure. Lead the team through execution of critical initiatives, drive incident response and root-cause analysis for mesh-level outages, and ensure long-term fixes land. Mentor engineers on technical depth and system design, while fostering a culture of ownership and constructive technical debate. Drive the adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools across the team, identifying opportunities to apply them in operational workflows like incident triage and log analysis. Set engineering standards for code quality, design reviews, and on-call practices, and represent the mesh platform in cross-organisation technical forums.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- at least 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years working on distributed systems, networking, or platform infrastructure
- deep, hands-on expertise with service mesh technologies — Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, Consul, or equivalent — including operating them at scale in production
- experience with microservices networking: HTTP, TCP/IP, gRPC, TLS/mTLS, load balancing, and service discovery
- track record leading the design and delivery of complex platform projects across multiple teams or quarters
- proficiency in Go (preferred), Java, or Python, with experience contributing to or extending mesh-related open-source projects
- expertise with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern observability stacks
- demonstrated ability to guide AI tool adoption in an engineering team — not just personal use, but raising the bar for how the team works
- excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical team members
- This role is onsite based in our Singapore office
Desired Qualifications
- You have contributions to upstream Istio, Envoy, Consul, or related open-source projects
- You have experience driving large-scale platform migrations (e.g., between mesh implementations, or from VM-based to Kubernetes-based service communication)
- You have experience designing or operating multi-cluster, multi-region service meshes
- You have background in security engineering, around workload identity, zero-trust networking, or policy enforcement
- You have experience building internal developer tools or agentic workflows on top of LLMs
- Go (preferred)
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