Lead Software Engineer, Backend

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.

Function: Engineering
Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level