Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh

About Grab

Grab is Southeast Asia's foremost superapp, providing a variety of services such as meal delivery, financial management, and transportation. Our mission focuses on empowering Southeast Asia economically using advanced technology and AI, driven by values including passion, excellence, and humility.

Role Overview

The Service Mesh Engineering team develops the critical infrastructure supporting microservice communication, securing traffic, enabling monitoring, and managing service resilience. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will steer the technical roadmap and architecture of Grab’s service mesh platform that underpins inter-service communication. Reporting to the Senior Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team to deliver a secure, scalable, and observable platform on-site in Singapore, foster AI tool adoption to enhance development efficiency, and influence engineering practices and collaboration across teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and direct a multi-year technical strategy for evolving the service mesh platform’s data and control planes and migration from legacy infrastructures.
• Architect and review advanced changes involving Istio, Envoy, or similar service mesh frameworks, focusing on stability, scalability, and security.
• Oversee platform concerns including traffic handling, service discovery, mutual TLS identity management, observability, rate limiting, and multi-cluster communication.
• Lead cross-team architecture decisions and represent the platform in organization-wide technical forums.
• Translate broad, multi-quarter plans into concrete deliverables and lead team execution.
• Lead incident response and thorough root cause analyses for platform outages, ensuring sustainable resolutions.
• Perform capacity planning, optimize performance, define service-level objectives, and set up proactive health monitoring.
• Mentor engineers at various levels on deep technical knowledge, system design, and platform-centric thinking.
• Participate in technical reviews, hiring, and developing team skills.
• Champion AI-assisted engineering tools for coding, reviews, incident analysis, and documentation to boost engineering velocity.
• Identify opportunities and lead projects embedding AI within operational workflows such as incident management and runbook automation.
• Create shared AI infrastructure and collaborative patterns that enhance measurable team productivity.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields, or equivalent experience.
• At least 6 years of software engineering experience with minimum 3 years focused on distributed systems, networking, or infrastructure platforms.
• Extensive hands-on knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, or Consul, managing them at scale.
• Strong understanding of microservices networking protocols and technologies including HTTP, TCP/IP, gRPC, TLS/mTLS, load balancing, and service discovery.
• Proven ability to lead and deliver complex platform projects spanning multiple teams and timelines.
• Proficiency in Go preferred, or Java and Python, with experience contributing to or modifying mesh-related open-source projects.
• Experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure from providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, DevOps practices, infrastructure as code, and advanced observability tools.
• Track record in advocating and integrating AI tools within engineering teams.

Additional Information

Life at Grab

• Comprehensive benefits including Term Life and Medical Insurance.
• Flexible benefits program tailored to individual needs.
• Parental leave, birthday leave, and community volunteering leave to support life events and social responsibility.
• Confidential assistance program to support personal and family well-being.

Diversity and Inclusion

Grab is dedicated to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace, providing equal opportunities regardless of background, emphasizing fairness and support for all employees to thrive.