Hazlin graduated from King’s College London and has worked as a broadcast journalist in a TV newsroom and as a foreign correspondent for Agence France-Presse. She also served at the United Nations in corporate communications before joining The Straits Times in 2007, but took a break from covering Malaysian news between 2012 and 2018. She returned to ST just in time for the historic 2018 Malaysian general election and the successive political crises.