Senior Principal Engineer, Business Platform & AI Architecture

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 Team

BECO (Business Ecosystem) powers a broad set of shared business platforms across Grab, including merchant platforms, search and personalization, ads and monetization, transaction systems, and selected enterprise capabilities. These platforms support multiple Grab businesses and operate at significant scale.

The organisation is entering a new phase of platform evolution. Our priorities include increasing engineering leverage through AI, improving platform cohesion across historically separate domains, and enabling faster incubation of new business capabilities without creating unnecessary fragmentation or long-term technical debt.

Get to Know the Role

We are hiring a Senior Principal Engineer to help shape the technical direction of the organisation.

You will work across areas such as search, recommendations, ads, merchant experience, order management, and shared business platform capabilities. The work will require both strategic judgment and hands-on depth: understanding existing systems quickly, identifying the highest-leverage opportunities, and helping teams move from problem definition to execution.

We are looking for someone who is strong in platform architecture, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to balance long-term technical quality with practical delivery needs.

You will report to the Head of Engineering, Business Ecosystem.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Drive cross-organisation technical initiatives: You will help define and lead technical work that spans multiple teams or domains. This includes identifying fragmentation, setting architecture direction, and driving execution on problems that do not fit neatly within a single team.
• Improve AI adoption in engineering workflows: A key part of this role is helping the organisation apply AI in practical, measurable ways. This may include AI-assisted development workflows, agentic automation for repetitive engineering tasks, test-backed migration or transformation workflows, and engineering guardrails that improve quality and speed. We are looking for applied engineering judgment, not AI demos.
• Support platformisation across business domains : You will help unify shared capabilities across areas such as search, personalization, ads, promo, merchant platforms, and transaction systems. This includes reducing duplicated platform logic, improving shared data and system design, and helping leaders decide what should be centralized versus what should remain domain-owned.
• Contribute to 0-to-1 initiatives: Some of the organisation's priorities involve building new capabilities quickly. You will help shape MVP architecture, define sensible milestones, unblock execution, and make pragmatic technical tradeoffs so teams can move fast without creating avoidable long-term issues.
• Raise technical quality in the areas you influence: Depending on the initiative, you may also improve reliability, observability, scalability, rollout safety, and cost efficiency. We expect you to think beyond design documents and consider how systems operate in production.

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Strong senior IC track record in a large-scale engineering environment, with a history of driving technical direction beyond a single team.
• Deep platform and distributed systems experience: You have strong architectural fundamentals and experience designing or evolving shared platforms, large backend systems, or infrastructure that supports multiple products or teams.
• Cross-domain influence: You can work across organizational boundaries, align different stakeholders, and make progress on technical problems that involve.
• Hands-on technical depth: You can engage deeply in system design, architecture reviews, technical tradeoffs, and, where needed, prototyping or implementation guidance.
• Practical AI engineering experience You have applied LLMs, automation, or agentic systems in real engineering workflows, and understand the importance of testing, quality control, latency, cost, and safe rollout.

 

What Success Looks Like (12–18 Months)

• AI-assisted engineering is a daily reality, not a pilot
• Reliability metrics trend structurally stronger
• Cross-platform capabilities converge
• At least one new business launches on a clean, scalable foundation
• Engineering quality becomes institutionalised

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.
• Balancing personal commitments and life's demands are made easier with our FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours

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.