Lead, AI & Agent Operations

About Singtel and AIDA Business Unit

Singtel is driving a transformative evolution through its new business unit AIDA, focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics. This strategic initiative aims to embed intelligence across all aspects of the company, enhancing human capabilities and unlocking new possibilities by aligning people, platforms, and processes under one unified strategy. Singtel embraces innovation, agility, and a culture that empowers individuals through AI literacy.

Role Overview

This leadership position directs the Day 2 AI & Agent Operations function, overseeing the management, monitoring, evaluation, and governance of the organization's AI production environment. This includes GenAI agents and classical machine learning models. Responsibilities include supervising agent operations, evaluation and observability teams, and ML operations teams, ensuring seamless handover from development to production with 24/7 monitoring, incident response, and maintaining safety and quality standards. The role serves as the senior operational authority for AI in production and collaborates closely with the build teams, platform teams, data experts, and business stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Full ownership of the end-to-end Day 2 operating model, including handover processes, evaluation and observability, 24/7 operations for agents and ML models across multiple locations.
• Leadership and development of teams based in Singapore and India focused on agent operations, evaluation, and ML operations.
• Management of a distributed, cross-border operation ensuring clear ownership, efficient handoffs, quality assurance, and wellbeing of teams working across different time zones.
• Authority over gatekeeping and go/no-go decisions to maintain integrity and evidence-based quality judgments, even under pressure.
• Overseeing incident governance including severity standards, escalation procedures, rollback protocols, and fallback plans for customer-impacting issues, as well as reporting major incidents and remediation efforts to senior management.
• Governance of deployment and change control concerning AI agents and models, coordinating closely with platform and development teams.
• Accountability for service level objectives, error budget policies, KPIs (availability, detection rates, resolution times, performance, costs), and regular reporting of AI reliability and value to executive leadership and the board.
• Development of growth and maturity plans for scaling the function’s coverage, tooling, and personnel as the AI estate expands.

Essential Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related disciplines.
• Over a decade of professional experience in technology fields, especially in production operations, site reliability engineering (SRE), or machine learning/AI functions.
• Proven leadership experience managing teams, including remote and cross-border groups.
• Demonstrated expertise in running and governing ML and AI systems in production environments.
• Strong knowledge in AI/ML operations, reliability engineering, and system observability.
• Experience in evaluation, gating processes, and quality governance for AI models.
• Familiarity with lifecycles and failure modes of both large language models/agent-based AI and classical machine learning techniques.
• Competence in incident management practices, establishing service-level objectives, and managing error budgets.
• Leadership skills supporting diverse teams across cultures, locations, and time zones with emphasis on team wellbeing.
• Ability to maintain independence and uphold quality and safety standards under pressure.
• Exceptional decision-making skills with clarity during incomplete information and crisis scenarios.
• Strong capabilities in stakeholder engagement and executive-level communication.
• Understanding of telecommunications consumer, enterprise (B2B), and network operations along with their customer impact considerations.