Engineering what matters: A bigger mission

• Zhang Ying’s 10-year engineering career with the Home Team has seen her join frontline operations, and work behind the scenes to better design technology that serves officers’ needs.
• Today, she harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and predict asset failures, to keep Home Team operations running smoothly.
• She found a sense of purpose in working with HTX: solving real-world problems for her community.

While her peers played with dolls and action cards, Zhang Ying was for a large part of her childhood fixated on brainteasers and puzzles.

“I love the process of figuring things out, more so than the outcome,” she quipped.

She eventually became particularly fascinated with mathematics and everything mechanical, and this led to her earning a bachelor’s degree and master’s in robotics and automation engineering, as well as a degree in accounting.

She later started her career in the private sector, building commercial software and cloud solutions for multinational companies. But that all changed one fateful day in 2016 when a question sprung to mind while she was volunteering at a grassroots community event, where she witnessed the effort fellow volunteers poured into organising activities, coordinating house visits and supporting vulnerable residents from behind the scenes.

The question?

“How can I better serve the community too, by using my engineering skills to create a direct impact on people’s lives?”

Finding purpose

Within the year, Zhang Ying joined the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) as a technology specialist who leveraged tech to enhance life-saving operations. Three years later, she became part of the pioneering group of engineers to form the Home Team’s science and tech arm: HTX.

The move to HTX was not a marked shift from her previous job scope. In her role as an engineer with HTX’s Civil Defence Programme Management Centre (CDPMC), she got numerous opportunities to work closely with her former colleagues as she led the development of technology capabilities for SCDF. In fact, she had on multiple occasions even gotten into the ambulance as part of efforts to upgrade the Advanced C3 Emergency System (ACES) – the tech powering Singapore’s ‘995’ emergency hotline.

Understanding the end-to-end workflow of an emergency call, she explained, was essential for her to develop a faster, smoother and more reliable solution.

Another notable project she worked on while at CDPMC was the Home Team’s first blockchain-enabled system for fire safety product certification and validation. Revolutionising the otherwise manual approach to the processing of fire safety certificates, the system promises stronger industry-wide collaboration, greater transparency and security.

Keeping the wheels turning

Since 2024, Zhang Ying has been applying her engineering expertise in a different niche. As a deputy director with HTX’s Platform Systems sustainment centre, she drives digital transformation that supports the management and maintenance of the Home Team’s assets.

“We’re talking thousands of assets – vehicles, vessels and weaponry – and being able to identify issues before they surface,” she expounded.

Together with her team of digital experts, she is developing an in-house platform which combines Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors with AI-powered analytics to deliver proactive asset monitoring and improve operational readiness. This will be housed at the Home Team Sustainment Centre.

“AI is opening exciting new possibilities today,” she said.

“Traditionally, engineers were activated for troubleshooting only after something has gone wrong. With AI, we can now link large volumes of live data from different sources, identify issues quicker and provide earlier insights, facilitating quicker decision-making and problem-solving.”

Most people only notice when something stops working, she added.

“Nobody sees the hours of testing and troubleshooting HTX’s sustainment engineers pour into preventing failures. They’re the unsung heroes that keep the Home Team going,” she mused.

It should come as no surprise that she considers this career chapter in the Home Team the most fulfilling. She recalled that the sense of purpose she derives from serving the nation came into sharpest focus when she was part of the 2023 Home Team Festival’s (HTF) organising committee.

When helping to produce a video showcasing HTX's science and tech innovations, the engineer was overwhelmed with a sense of pride.

“Stepping back to witness HTX's impact on public safety, not just within engineering but also across science and digital domains, made me realise that I am part of something far larger than myself,” she said.

“And I’m so proud to be part of this meaningful mission.”

Advice for the next generation

She has also passed her zest for problem-solving on to her children, aged 12 and 14, taking the same approach with parenting as she does with her team at work – encouraging them to define their goals before working out their own path.

When they come to her stumped by a homework problem, her first instinct isn’t to offer them the answer. Instead, she guides them through the reasoning process, posing questions such as “What do you think you can do next?” or “Is there another approach you could try?”.

“Often, they wish for me to just reveal the answer,” she laughed.

“But I think learning how to approach a problem is much more valuable than simply knowing the solution. I guess that’s just the engineer in me talking.”

Staying curious about how things work and remaining open to learning from failure are principles that Zhang Ying has long lived by. And she believes that those who share the same mindset should consider an engineering career.

“You don’t have to have spent your childhood wanting to build machines or write code. As long as you’re inquisitive and willing to try, you can apply engineering thinking to solve real-world problems,” she surmised.