Lead Software Engineer, Backend

Grab · Petaling Jaya

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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

At Business Platform, our goal is to make merchants happy and help them succeed. We serve everyone from a single warung or hawker stall to large international franchises and supermarket chains across Southeast Asia.

Many of our largest merchants don't run their business in the GrabMerchant app. They use their own POS, ERP or ordering systems. The Partner Integration team builds and runs the GrabFood and GrabMart Partner APIs. These APIs let POS vendors, QSR chains, aggregators and retailers sync menus, prices and stock with Grab, receive and manage orders, and control their stores from their own systems.

We also oversee the catalog data service that stores this menu data, which most merchant-facing products at Grab depend on. If you have ordered from a big restaurant chain on Grab, your order most likely went through our systems.

Get to Know the Role

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to be the technical leader of the Partner Integration. You will oversee the architecture of a public, partner-facing API platform: its contracts, its reliability, and the experience of the partners who build on it. You will turn ambiguous, high impact problems into technical direction for the team, lead projects that span several teams, and help the engineers around you get better.

You will be reporting to the Software Engineering Manager II and will be base onsite at our Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Oversee the technical direction of the Partner Integration service. Turn vague business and partner problems into clear technical solutions. Write and lead RFCs and technical specs for critical systems such as partner-facing APIs, outbound order and menu webhooks, and large-scale menu and catalog sync. Make sound trade-offs between cost, quality and time-to-market.
• Design public API contracts that last. Set the standards for API design, versioning, backward compatibility, authentication (OAuth2, HMAC), multi-tenant isolation and sandbox parity, so that hundreds of partner integrations keep working while the platform changes underneath them.
• Oversee reliability, scalability and cost. Oversee the non-functional requirements of the team's services: delivery success rates for partner webhooks, sync correctness when partner data is untrusted, MySQL and queue performance at peak load, and cloud cost. Find systemic issues, argue for the resources to fix them, and lead the fixes through.
• Lead operations and incident response. Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems for partner-affecting issues without needing an incident commander. Go past the obvious cause to the underlying ones, such as earlier architectural choices, technical debt or how systems interact. Oversee rollout and rollback strategy for the team's systems, including feature flags, dual-running and shadow comparison for migrations.
• Be the Engineering Owner for cross-team projects. Lead large projects involving several teams, for example moving partner channels onto new platforms or launching the Partner API in new markets. Define and break down requirements, map and resolve cross-team dependencies, and deliver safely to production.
• Partner across departments and with external engineers. Work with PMs, EMs, Integration Support, Key Account Managers and partners' engineering teams to align and agree on technical and operational decisions. Bring partner and business context into design decisions.
• Raise the standards for the team. Be a formal mentor to Senior and mid-level engineers through design and code reviews, 1:1s and pair programming. Oversee the team's coding, testing and code-quality standards. Lead knowledge sharing across the Tech Family, and help hire as an interviewer and by improving the interview process.

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Experience: At least 8 years of backend software engineering, including at least 2 years as the Technical Lead/Design Owner for production systems. Solid expertise in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, Scala or C++, plus the ability to work across others. Go is our primary language.
• API platforms: Experience designing and running external-facing APIs or integration platforms used by third parties. This includes versioned contracts, authentication and authorization, rate limiting and tenant isolation, developer documentation or SDKs, and debugging integrations with external engineering teams.
• Distributed systems: Solid experience with microservices and distributed systems. This includes asynchronous messaging (SQS, Kafka or similar) and its delivery semantics: retries, idempotency, ordering, deduplication and dead-letter handling. It also includes caching, distributed locking and eventual consistency.
• Data at scale: Deep experience with relational databases (MySQL preferred) under heavy production load, including schema and index design, query and pagination performance, replica routing and optimistic concurrency. Familiarity with NoSQL stores (DynamoDB, Redis) and search (Elasticsearch).
• Operational excellence: Experience owning production services on AWS, GCP or Azure, including on-call leadership, observability (metrics, tracing, logs), SLOs, capacity planning, and safe rollout practices such as feature flags, canaries and migrations.
• Technical leadership: To lead technical work with several teams, write clear design documents, influence decisions without formal authority, and mentor engineers to the next level.
• Communication: Lead clear conversations and discussions with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including external partners.

Good-to-Have:

• Experience integrating with POS, ERP, e-commerce, or food delivery and logistics systems.
• Experience with product catalog, menu or inventory data: hierarchical data models, bulk import, snapshot diffing or reconciliation, and propagation from a master copy to many stores.
• Experience operating webhook or notification delivery systems with measured delivery SLOs.
• Experience running large migrations or retiring legacy integration channels (for example SFTP or file-based) with zero partner downtime.
• Public technical contributions such as engineering blog posts, open-source work or conference talks.

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 provides equal opportunity for Grabbers to grow and perform at their best. We consider all candidates fairly and equally regardless of nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, age, gender, family commitments, physical and mental impairments or disabilities, and other attributes that make them unique.

More jobs at Grab · Software Engineering jobs in Petaling Jaya