Lead Data Scientist (Grabmart)

About Grab and Our Workplace

Grab is Southeast Asia's leading superapp. From getting your favourite meals delivered to helping you manage your finances and getting around town hassle-free, we've got your back with everything. In Grab, purpose gives us joy and habits build excellence, while harnessing the power of Technology and AI to deliver the mission of driving Southeast Asia forward by economically empowering everyone, with heart, hunger, honour, and humility.

Get to know the role:

We are looking for Lead Data Scientists to own high-impact projects end-to-end—from scoping the problem and proposing scalable DS architectures to deploying services and driving continuous model evolution. You will operate with high autonomy, partnering with Engineering, Product, and Analytics teams to deliver advanced data-driven solutions.

Core Responsibilities:

• Extract Insights: Analyze massive datasets (transactional, behavioral, and geospatial) to decode shopping patterns and optimize the end-to-end journey for grocery and retail services.
• Identify Opportunities & Propose AI Solutions:• Next-Gen User Experience: Move beyond static interfaces to build agentic, conversational, and anticipatory experiences. You will predict shopping intent and brand preferences to power autonomous shopping assistants that can handle complex queries, automate re-ordering, and provide hyper-personalized discovery.
• Demand Forecasting: Create high-precision, hyper-local spatio-temporal models using complex signals from different sources. You will provide granular SKU-level predictions at various time scales to optimize supply chain readiness, inventory pre-positioning, and resource allocation to minimize stock-outs and waste.
• Demand Shaping: Implement intelligent optimization algorithms to balance demand and supply in real-time. You will optimize platform visibility and leverage contextual nudges spatially and temporally to balance demand with merchant/driver supply, maximizing network throughput and reducing unfulfilled orders.
• Demand Generation: Identifying "hidden" customers and decoding their unique shopping patterns to unlock new demand. You will build AI models to power smart, automated targeting of diverse user segments to drive sustainable growth.
• Service Reliability: Build predictive models to safeguard the order lifecycle. This includes identifying high-risk orders prone to cancellation, predicting fulfillment failures due to insufficient inventory, and flagging transactions that require special handling or proactive intervention to ensure a perfect delivery experience.

• Build, Deploy and Iterate: Develop production-grade AI models. Refine performance through rigorous A/B testing and real-time monitoring.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work alongside PMs, Engineers, and Operations to scale solutions across the region.
• ML Operational Excellence: Drive for ML operational excellence in data science projects by ensuring robust versioning, automated testing, seamless deployment, performance monitoring, and continuous improvement of ML pipelines.
• Innovate: Drive the team's technical roadmap and contribute to IP creation and research.

Must-have

• Education: Ph.D. or Master's degree in Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Operations Research, or a related quantitative field.
• Experience: 5+ years of experience as a Data Scientist, with a proven track record in Grabmart
• Technical Depth: Deep understanding of ML/DL, data mining, and optimization algorithms. Proficiency in frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Programming: Proficient in Python or Scala.
• Soft Skills: Self-motivated, independent learner with excellent communication skills to articulate complex insights to non-technical stakeholders.
• Adaptability: Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and manage multiple high-priority workstreams.

Preferred to have:

• Specialized Experience: Building large-scale recommender systems, customer segmentation, or supply-chain optimization.
• Big Data: Hands-on experience with Spark, Flink, or Kafka for large-scale/real-time data processing.
• Engineering Excellence: Familiarity with CI/CD principles for ML (MLOps).
• Generative AI:• Experience in fine-tuning LLMs and building LLM-based applications
• Familiarity with agentic development tools (e.g., LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI) and experience building autonomous agentic systems to solve complex, multi-step commerce workflows.

Life at Grab

We care about your well-being at Grab, here are some of the global benefits we offer:

• We have your back with Term Life Insurance and comprehensive Medical Insurance.
• With GrabFlex, create a benefits package that suits your needs and aspirations.
• Celebrate moments that matter in life with loved ones through Parental and Birthday leave, and give back to your communities through Love-all-Serve-all (LASA) volunteering leave
• We have a confidential Grabber Assistance Programme to guide and uplift you and your loved ones through life's challenges.

What we stand for at Grab

We are committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace that enables diverse Grabbers to grow and perform at their best. As an equal opportunity employer, we consider all candidates fairly and equally regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, family commitments, physical and mental impairments or disabilities, and other attributes that make them unique.