Software Engineer - A26268

Activate Interactive Pte Ltd (“Activate”) is a leading technology consultancy headquartered in Singapore with a presence in Malaysia and Indonesia. Our clients are empowered with quality, cost-effective, and impactful end-to-end application development, like mobile and web applications, and cloud technology that remove technology roadblocks and increase their business efficiency.

We believe in positively impacting the lives of people around us and the environment we live in through the use of technology. Hence, we are committed to providing a conducive environment for all employees to realise their full potential, who in turn have the opportunity to continuously drive innovation.

We are searching for our next team members to join our growing team.

If you love the idea of being part of a growing company with exciting prospects in mobile and web technologies that create positive impact on people’s lives, then we would love to hear from you.

Co-Development Business Unit is looking for a Software Engineer

This is a fixed term contract role. The engagement is 1 year.

Internal Code: A26268

We are looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer to join the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB) team, working on Scanvas - SEAB's next-generation AI-powered platform for digitising national examination scripts.

This is not a role where you spend your days inside a browser tab. You will write web applications, yes - but you will also write code that talks to scanners, ships as a desktop application to scan-room operators, and integrates with AI services that process hundreds of thousands of exam pages under real time pressure. If that breadth excites you rather than unsettles you, read on.

The Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board designs and administers national examinations - PSLE, GCE N/O/A-Levels, and more - that shape the educational journey of hundreds of thousands of students every year. Trust, integrity, and precision are not aspirational values here; they are operational requirements.

SEAB is in the middle of a technology modernisation. Scanvas replaces existing scanning stack with a platform that SEAB owns, controls, and can evolve - and it must be production-ready for national exam seasons where failure is not an option.

What Scanvas Is

Scanvas is an Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) and script digitisation platform. It does two things:

On the hardware side: scan-room operators use a desktop application (ScanController) to drive high-throughput TWAIN-compatible document scanners, validate scans in real time, and upload captured images to the cloud.

On the platform side: a web application lets assessment staff generate script templates from exam paper PDFs using AI (zone detection, LLM-assisted layout), process uploaded scans against those templates, and route digitised responses to the marking system. The two sides are tightly coupled. Understanding one helps you build the other

• You will touch real hardware. The scanners are physical machines in a physical room. When something breaks - a driver handshake, a paper jam mid-batch, a scan that arrives corrupted - your code needs to handle it gracefully, and you need to be comfortable debugging it.
• The desktop application runs on government-managed Windows machines, not your MacBook. Distribution, update management, and compatibility constraints are real engineering problems here.
• AI is not a feature you bolt on. Template generation, zone detection, and handwriting OCR are core to what Scanvas does. You will integrate and tune these pipelines, not just call an API and hope.
• The workload is lumpy and extreme. 12 million pages must be scanned and processed across a three-month window each year, with days that peak above a million pages. The system you build will either hold or collapse under that load - there is no gradual rollout.
• Build and maintain the Scanvas web platform - API routes, background job queues, database models, and the canvas-based template editor that assessment staff use to configure OMR zones.
• Build and maintain the ScanController desktop application - the interface between scan-room operators, the scanner hardware, and the cloud backend.
• Integrate hardware: scanner SDKs, driver interfaces (TWAIN/ISIS/WIA or vendor APIs), and scan-capture pipelines that validate quality and handle errors before upload.
• Integrate AI services: LLM APIs for OMR template generation, computer vision for zone detection, and document OCR/ICR for handwritten and typed responses on mix-form booklets.
• Design and optimise for throughput - job queues, concurrency limits, rate-limited external AI calls, and S3 storage pipelines that must sustain peak exam-season load.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager and operations team to turn real scan-room workflows into software that people trust under pressure.
• Maintain engineering rigour: TDD, typed code, clean API boundaries, meaningful CI gates, and documentation that the next engineer can actually use

Requirements

What are we looking for?

• The fundamentals matter most. We are not prescriptive about your current stack. Engineers who understand why systems behave the way they do pick up new frameworks quickly.
• Engineers who only know their current framework struggle when the problem doesn't fit the tutorial.
• What the fundamentals look like in practice:
• You can design a system given a set of constraints and articulate the trade-offs you made. You don't need a framework to do this.
• You understand concurrency - threads, event loops, async/await - well enough to reason about race conditions and bottlenecks, not just write await and hope.
• You write tests before you're asked to, not because it's policy but because you've been burned by not doing it.
• You've debugged something that crossed a system boundary - a network call, an OS driver, a hardware device - and know how to work methodically when the usual tools don't apply.

What you bring:

• Solid full-stack experience - web frontend, backend APIs, relational databases. The specific framework matters less than the depth of understanding behind it.
• Comfort building desktop applications, whether native, Electron-based, or equivalent.
• You understand the operational differences between shipping a web app and shipping a binary that runs on someone else's managed machine.
• Some experience (or genuine appetite for) hardware or device integration - SDKs, serial/USB interfaces, vendor APIs, driver-level debugging. You don't need to be an embedded engineer, but you shouldn't be intimidated by it either.
• Experience integrating AI/ML APIs into production systems - not just calling an endpoint, but handling rate limits, retries, token budgets, prompt versioning, and evaluating output quality.
• Comfort with cloud infrastructure: containers, managed services, object storage, job queues. You understand what runs where and why.
• Strong foundation in software hygiene: version control discipline, automated testing, code review, and CI/CD.
• Experience with image processing pipelines (ingest, validate, transform, store at scale)
• Prior work in the Singapore Government Tech Stack
• Familiarity with OMR, document scanning, or similar high-throughput document processing contexts.
• TypeScript, Next.js, C# - our current stack. Mention it if you know it, but don't let unfamiliarity stop you from applying.

What We Are Not Looking For

• Engineers who are only comfortable when the problem has a well-documented npm package. Hardware has datasheets and vendor SDKs, not Stack Overflow answers.
• Engineers who treat "it worked on my machine" as a shipping criterion. Scan rooms run on managed Windows environments with locked-down network policies and no developer tools installed.
• Engineers who outsource architectural thinking entirely to AI coding assistants. We use AI tools and encourage it - but the engineer needs to own the design, verify the output, and catch the mistakes.
• Engineers who treat testing and security as someone else's job. In a system that processes national exam papers, untested code is a liability we cannot carry.

Signals That Will Stand Out

• You've integrated a hardware device or vendor SDK into software and can describe a failure mode you had to debug - and how you did it.
• You've built something that runs as a deployed desktop application, not just a web app with npm start.
• You have a view on the right level of abstraction between hardware, application logic, and cloud - not just "it depends" but an actual opinion you can defend.
• You've worked in a high-stakes operational context where downtime had consequences beyond a Slack alert.

Benefits

What do we offer in return?

Competitive Compensation: Market competitive salary and variable performance bonus aligned to your skills, impact, and contribution.

Benefits: Outpatient medical, specialist medical coverage and generous customisable flexi benefits, or flexi allowance; life and health insurance, thoughtful perks like special occasions “red packet” and CNY goodies, etc.

Employee Wellness: Support for your physical, mental, and overall well-being through year-round initiatives.

Growth & Development: Learning programmes, certification support, and a dedicated staff development budget. (We are a “SHRI 2025 Gold winner” in “Learning & Development; Coaching & Mentoring”)

Career Progression: Structured career pathways that enable you to grow along a technical/domain expert track or a leadership track.

Competency Framework: A structured and practical framework to support you to develop, perform, and succeed.

Flexible Work Arrangement: Staff may choose to work flexi-place, flexi-time, and flexi-load based on existing framework

Why you'll love working with us?

If you are looking for opportunities to collaborate with leading industry experts and be surrounded by highly motivated and talented peers, we welcome you to join us. We provide all employees with equal opportunities to grow and develop with us. We believe your success is our success.

Does it sound like something you are interested in exploring further? Please be in touch with our team for an initial chat.

Activate Interactive Singapore is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions will be based on merit, qualifications and abilities. Activate Interactive Pte Ltd does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, colour, religion, gender, sexuality, national origin, age, disability, marital status or any other characteristics protected by law.

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