Senior/Lead Research Engineer (AI) - Centre of Excellence in Maritime Safety (CEMS)

[What the role is]

Plaque of Commendation (Gold) – NTUC May Day Awards 2026

Most Positive Workplace Collaboration Award – Singapore International Chamber of Commerce (SICC) Awards 2025

The Straits Times Singapore’s Best Employers for 2024, 2025 & 2026

The Centre of Excellence in Maritime Safety (CEMS) is a national R&D centre, a collaborative effort between Singapore Polytechnic and the Singapore Maritime Institute. We focus on developing innovative digital solutions and training systems to enhance maritime safety. Our state-of-the-art research facilities, including South-east Asia's first navigation research simulator, setting us as an innovation champion.

About the Role

You will join CEMS as a Lead/Senior Lead Research Engineer and play a key role in developing applied AI solutions for real-world use cases across training, assessment, operations, research, and digital transformation.

The role requires strong hands-on experience in computer vision and/or speech recognition, with the ability to design, develop, evaluate, and deploy AI models. You will work on centre-level AI projects and may also contribute to department- and school-level AI initiatives involving broader AI adoption across R&D, operations, and education.

As a senior member of the team, you will also supervise and guide AI engineers, support project planning, and ensure technical delivery across multiple AI workstreams. [What you will be working on]

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement AI models and pipelines for real-world applications in training, assessment, safety, operations, and decision-support.
• Develop AI solutions involving video analytics, object detection, image classification, visual attention analysis, speech-to-text, audio processing, communication analysis, and related applied AI tasks.
• Work with data from video, audio, sensors, simulators, operational systems, and other sources to develop AI-enabled analytics and assessment capabilities.
• Integrate AI models with software platforms, dashboards, simulators, sensor systems, training platforms, or decision-support tools to support practical deployment and operational use.
• Explore, evaluate, and prototype suitable AI techniques, including deep learning, sequence models, multimodal learning, natural language processing, and large language model applications where relevant.
• Lead AI components within R&D projects, manage technical milestones, prepare documentation, and ensure timely delivery of project outputs.
• Supervise and mentor AI engineers or junior team members, review technical approaches, guide model development, and support capability building within the AI team.
• Work with internal teams, academic staff, industry partners, and external stakeholders to co-develop AI solutions and apply AI capabilities across centre-, department-, and school-level initiatives.
• Present AI approaches, findings, prototypes, and project outcomes to management, project partners, and industry collaborators in a clear and practical manner.

[What we are looking for]

Qualifications

• Tertiary Qualification in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.
• Strong hands-on experience in computer vision and/or speech recognition, including model development, training, evaluation, and deployment. Relevant technical experience may include video analytics, object detection, image classification, pose or behaviour recognition, visual attention analysis, speech-to-text, audio processing, speaker or communication analysis, natural language processing, or multimodal AI involving video, audio, sensor, simulator, or time-series data.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with AI/ML frameworks and toolkits such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenCV, Hugging Face, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of machine learning and deep learning model developme