Head of Engineering, AI Transformation

Company Description

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.

Job Description

Get to Know the Team

Grab operates one of Southeast Asia's most complex digital ecosystems — connecting millions of consumers, drivers, merchants, and partners across mobility, food delivery, e-commerce, financial services, and digital products.

The Consumer Experience & Integrity (CXI) organisation cuts across this ecosystem, spanning Trust, Safety, Identity, SuperApp architecture, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Agentic Customer Support, Communications, Home Page Personalisation, and Growth.

We are a team of builders working at the intersection of scale, reliability, and AI-native engineering — solving problems that matter for hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia.

Get to Know the Role

At the Head of Engineering level, this position is a senior individual contributor with an organisation-wide mandate: transform how we engineer with AI, raise the architectural bar for large-scale distributed systems, and create common platforms that allow teams to move faster with greater autonomy.

You will partner with senior engineers, engineering leaders, product leaders, and data scientists to drive technical direction across CXI through architectural clarity, deep technical craft, and enabling others to succeed.

You will report to the Head of Technology, Integrity & COREX.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

1. Transform the Software Development Lifecycle with AI

You will lead CXI's shift from isolated AI tools toward a fully AI-native engineering model by shaping the architecture, platforms, and practices needed to embed AI and autonomous agents throughout the software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, operations, and incident response. You will leverage GenAI to design evaluation frameworks, guardrail systems, and context/knowledge systems that make higher-autonomy engineering safe and scalable, enabling teams to operate with faster feedback loops and significantly higher engineering leverage.

2. Architect Systems for Massive Scale and Reliability

• You will provide architectural leadership for high-throughput, highly available distributed systems powering critical consumer and integrity experiences.
• Using AI-assisted design and analysis tools, you will help teams solve hard problems around scalability, reliability, resilience, performance, security, and cost — establishing architectural patterns that prevent systemic failures rather than solving reliability one incident at a time.

3. Build Common Platforms Across the Grab Ecosystem

• You will identify where capabilities should remain domain-specific and where they should become shared platform primitives — creating leverage across mobility, food delivery, e-commerce, financial services, and digital products.
• You will use GenAI to accelerate platform design, documentation, and adoption — solving difficult platform problems once and enabling many teams to build on top of them.

4. Enable Autonomous Teams While Maintaining Architectural Coherence

• You will establish reference architectures, engineering principles, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails that allow teams to make decisions independently.
• For the hardest cross-cutting problems, you will go deeper — helping teams evaluate trade-offs and converge on architectures that work beyond a single use case. Success means teams become more autonomous because of the architecture, not more dependent on you.

5. Drive Technical Influence Across CXI Leadership

• You will serve as a trusted technical voice for senior engineers, engineering leaders, and product leaders — communicating complex architectural trade-offs clearly, shaping long-term technical strategy, and representing CXI engineering standards in cross-functional and company-wide forums.
• You will use AI tools to synthesise technical signals, model scenarios, and accelerate the preparation of architectural proposals and decision artefacts.

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• You have 15+ years of experience in software engineering and system design, with at least 5 years in a principal engineer or architect role at large-scale technology companies.
• You have hands-on experience driving AI-enabled engineering transformation — including coding agents, agentic workflows, automated testing, evaluation frameworks, and engineering guardrails — and a track record of embedding AI tools into real engineering teams.
• You have architected and scaled large distributed systems serving millions of users with demanding reliability, availability, and performance requirements in production environments.
• You have built or led shared platform capabilities adopted across multiple products, business lines, or engineering organisations, with measurable impact on engineering velocity or system reliability.
• You have led cross-team architectural initiatives and demonstrated the ability to influence senior engineers and engineering leaders without relying on direct reporting authority.
• You have experience engaging with AI tools and emerging technologies to enhance productivity, improve workflows, and contribute new ideas — including using GenAI for design, documentation, code review, and technical analysis at scale.

Additional Information

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.