Why you should join Temasek Root Access

Mark Lim Choon Lye
Temasek Root Access
7 min readApr 3, 2019

Build a culture of scalable innovation; Create and use technology for the good of the community; Build new friendships, learn new stuff! Get a seat on our rocket ship; Dream big, start small, do now.

Hi there, I’m Mark! I lead the new digital technology team at Temasek. We call ourselves “Root Access” — please allow me to share with you why.

What is Temasek Root Access?

“Root Access” refers to having full privileged control over a system in order to modify or improve it. We believe that the name “Root Access” represents our mindset to improve the way Temasek works. If we can do this for Temasek, it means our colleagues can be more effective in what they do at work and for our communities.

Techies will get this :-)

Vision of Temasek Root Access

Our vision is to empower our company’s people to create more value, by enabling and inspiring our people with a culture of scalable innovation — by providing them with high quality data and intelligent digital platforms.

Our vision is to empower our company’s people to create more value, by enabling and inspiring our people with a culture of scalable innovation — by providing them with high quality data and intelligent digital platforms.

Our team believes that the key to success is people. We seek to inspire people with a growth mindset, and empower them with the right technology, culture, processes to make a difference for themselves and our organisation.

The Root Access logo depicts a digitally powered root and a person embracing new technology and the cloud for scalable innovation. The person and the cloud also form the image of a tree that produces fruits of value.

Join Temasek Root Access today

If you’re reading this and thinking of joining us, let me share with you why you should take this leap of faith!

1. Get a seat on our rocket ship

How many times in your career do you get the chance to help a large and established international company pioneer exciting new digital technology capabilities that help make a real and measurable difference?

Our team is growing quickly, and our business demands are growing even faster. Join us today on our rocket ship alongside a diverse bunch of people who have worked in big companies like Amazon, BlackRock, Bridgewater, DBS, McKinsey and GovTech, and others who’ve founded their own start-ups.

As an Agile in-house digital tech team, we strive to achieve excellence in tech and design, based on what we’ve learnt and achieved elsewhere. We build some of our products in close collaboration with the industry’s best software and AI partners, whom we carefully select through a hackathon process.

2. Dream big, start small, do now

Here at Root Access, we challenge ourselves with this question every day: How do we leverage on digital technology to improve the quality of life for our people?

Our awesome team@Root Access

We have big dreams of harnessing state-of-the-art technologies to anchor Temasek’s digital transformation journey. You’ll have the opportunity to build really interesting data products using open source technology in the rapidly evolving areas of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data. Some of our product goals include capitalizing on our internal and external data to help our colleagues across Investment teams make informed and quality decisions, as well as automating laborious manual processes.

You can also take on other exciting tech challenges, such as building a ‘Super App’ for the firm, and apply your creativity to solve challenges that frustrate or hinder our colleagues. And maybe in the future, even building a product ecosystem for our portfolio companies and subsidiaries.

3. Build a culture of scalable innovation

Empowered by our senior leadership, our team strives to build a culture of scalable innovation across the firm. Every individual in the firm gets the opportunity and access to digital technology to work on ideas that could improve the way we work and live. Innovation can make our people more efficient and productive, which improves what they do and makes them happier in the way they work. Freeing people from boring process work that can be automated lets them spend more time on their mission, and giving more back to our communities. It sounds bold, but that’s what technology can do!

We set out to inspire and empower our colleagues across the firm to start solving their own challenges at work, using new tools that we built for them. To cite a recent example: We engineered an advanced self-service data science workbench, which allows anyone in Temasek to create useful data models and data visualizations that could bring them new and powerful insights. This has given our colleagues the ability to become more productive and agile, as well as the opportunity to build highly sought-after data science capabilities, such as Python and R skills.

The first place winner of the CEO Innovation Challenge — the team that built an AI prototype to transcribe content such as charts from photos!

With support from the local startup ecosystem, we recently ran an internal three-month hackathon called the “CEO Innovation Challenge.” With little or no tech background, our business colleagues managed to perform amazing feats such as picking up Machine Learning on Coursera and building a prototype to transcribe content such as charts from photos. Another team prototyped a closed-loop ecosystem to reduce the use of plastic takeaway beverage cups throughout Singapore!

4. Create and use technology for the good of the community

This year, our team has committed to explore how we can leverage Temasek’s broad business networks and channel our passion in tech for the larger social good.

Winning teams of Startup Weekend Singapore Mega 2018 went on to participate in The Start, a new pre-accelerator program jointly run by StartupX and Temasek.

For example, we are currently running a new pre-accelerator program called “The Start”, where local startups aiming to create social impact vie for mentorships and sponsorship from Temasek. One of the teams in the programme is working on a product that uses VR technology to assist the treatment of people suffering from dementia.

One of the top winning teams of the CEO Innovation Challenge also prototyped a digital platform to connect the special needs community to suitable recreational facilities and activities through crowdsourcing.

As we work to transform Temasek, we want to impact communities too. It’s not just about us — Temasek is passionate about the communities in which we live. If you are looking to make a difference in people’s lives, this is the place to be.

We aim to do well as an investor, do right as an institution, do good as a steward.

5. Build new friendships, learn new stuff!

Being a part of the Temasek family allows you to build valuable friendships. People here are a smart and friendly bunch!

As part of your work here, you could get the chance to understand first-hand how a company gets evaluated from an investor’s point of view. You may even get to help our colleagues evaluate technology-related investments, or use data solutions to help them understand more about companies they’re looking at. This could be an exciting opportunity for you to get plugged into how great companies around the world are transforming the way we consume, live and play.

We work hard and play hard together!

Take the step to apply today

We are looking for talented and passionate people who want to make a difference, and are constantly willing to learn new things (especially in a rapidly changing technology landscape). We are an equal opportunity workplace, because we believe a diverse workplace brings all the best attributes of our community to us. So your age, gender and educational background don’t matter to us. What’s more important is an awesome attitude, being street-smart and bringing a real-world ability to contribute to what we do.

So your age, gender and educational background don’t matter to us. What’s more important is an awesome attitude, being street-smart and bringing a real-world ability to contribute to what we do.

We are now hiring for the following roles: Full Stack Software Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, UI/UX Lead, Machine Learning Researcher, Product Manager (Data Visualization and Analytics), Quality Engineering Lead.

If you believe that you will be a great fit for us here at Root Access, apply today! We’d love to have a chat!

Hope this post gives you a quick sense of what we’re trying to do here, and that it may tempt you to get in touch and tell us what you think you can bring to us!

Signing off,

Mark Lim

On behalf of Temasek Root Access.

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Mark Lim Choon Lye
Temasek Root Access

Managing Director of Digital Technology at Temasek Holdings, Temasek International. Digital, Big Data, Agile, UXD, CI/CD automation, cloud native, microservices