Deputy Director, AI R&D (Language AI), xData

What The Role Is

The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) is a statutory board under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) which aims to pioneer innovation solutions and develop world class science and technology capabilities to transform and empower the Home Team in delivering safety and security for Singapore.

We are looking for a suitable candidate to

Lead and grow a multidisciplinary team of AI scientists, machine learning engineers and researchers to advance HTX's Voice AI capabilities, translating applied AI R&D into operational products and mission-ready solutions for the Home Team.
Drive the design, development and deployment of next-generation Voice AI, Conversational AI and Agentic AI solutions, including voice agents, speech technologies and spoken language models across diverse operational environments.
Partner closely with Home Team Departments, product teams and business stakeholders to identify high-value use cases, shape AI strategies and deliver innovative solutions that address complex operational challenges and unlock transformative capabilities.
Provide technical and product leadership across the end-to-end AI lifecycle, from research, experimentation and prototyping through production deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement.
Ensure AI solutions are scalable, secure, reliable and fit for purpose, balancing technological innovation with user needs, operational requirements, governance standards and organisational roadmaps.
Establish best practices in AI engineering, model evaluation, Responsible AI, MLOps and AI product delivery to ensure high-quality, trusted and sustainable AI systems.
Coach, mentor and develop talent within the team, fostering a high-performance culture of innovation, collaboration and technical excellence while ensuring timely delivery of strategic outcomes.

What You Will Be Working On

The principal accountabilities of the job holder are (but not limited to):

Lead data scientist and AI engineers, product managers and other stakeholders to identify, scope, develop and implement data science and AI solutions.
Lead teams to design and implement data pre-processing, feature engineering, machine learning model development, and evaluation of techniques and algorithms.
Guide evaluation and benchmarking of analytical outputs and conduct regular review of productionised models, including model refresh or retirement.
Lead the development and deployment of Voice AI agent and harness.
Provide engineering leadership for the deployment of voice AI to different endpoints that can meet performance requirements.

What We Are Looking For

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Linguistics, Speech Processing, or a related quantitative discipline.
Minimum 8-12 years of experience in software engineering, AI/ML, data science or product engineering, with at least 5 years in a leadership role managing multidisciplinary engineering teams.
Proven track record of building and deploying AI products into production environments, including ownership of architecture, delivery, operations and continuous improvement.
Hands-on experience in Voice AI, Speech AI, Conversational AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Spoken Language Models (SLMs), or related Language AI domains
Experience leading the development of real-time voice agents, speech analytics platforms, contact centre AI solutions, digital assistants, audio intelligence systems, or multimodal AI products.
Experience managing cross-functional teams comprising AI researchers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, software engineers, product managers and UX specialists.
Strong expertise in Voice AI, Speech AI and Language AI technologies, including Speech-to-Text (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Voice Agents, Conversational AI, Spoken Language Models and audio analytics.
Proven ability to lead end-to-end AI product development, translating user needs and operational requirements into scalable, production-ready AI solutions.

All new hires are appointed on a two-year contract in the first instance and will be assessed and considered for permanent tenure over time, based on performance.

As part of the shortlisting process for this role, you may be required to complete a medical declaration and/or undergo further assessment.

All applicants will be updated on the status of their applications within 4 weeks upon closing of the advertisement.