Senior Principal Engineer, AI Transformation

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 . Get to Know the Role We are looking for a senior technical leader—a strong 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 and patterns that allow teams to move faster with greater autonomy. The Critical Tasks You Will Perform 1. Transform the Software Development Lifecycle with AI AI is fundamentally changing how software is designed, built, tested, operated, and evolved. You will help CXI move beyond isolated AI coding tools toward an AI-native engineering model. Shape the architecture and engineering practices needed to embed AI and autonomous agents throughout the SDLC—from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, operations, and incident response. Establish the platforms, context and knowledge systems, evaluation frameworks, testing strategies, and guardrails that make higher-autonomy engineering safe and scalable. The goal is to enable teams to operate with greater autonomy, faster feedback loops, stronger quality, and significantly higher engineering leverage. 2. Architect Systems for Massive Scale and Reliability Provide architectural leadership for high-throughput, highly available distributed systems powering critical consumer and integrity experiences. Help teams solve difficult problems around scalability, reliability, resilience, performance, security, and cost, while establishing architectural patterns that prevent systemic failures rather than solving reliability one incident at a time. 3. Build Common Platforms Across the Grab Ecosystem CXI spans Integrity—Trust, Safety, and Identity—as well as SuperApp architecture, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Agentic Customer Support, Communications, Personalisation, and Growth. Identify where capabilities should remain domain-specific and where they should become common platform primitives, creating leverage across businesses including mobility, food delivery, e-commerce, financial services, and digital products. The goal is simple: solve difficult platform problems once and enable many teams and businesses to build on top of them. 4. Enable Autonomous Teams While Maintaining Architectural Coherence Serve as a technical architect and force multiplier across CXI, partnering with senior engineers, engineering leaders, product leaders, and data scientists. Establish reference architectures, engineering principles, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails that allow teams to make more decisions independently. For the hardest cross-cutting problems, go deeper to help 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 the architect. What Essential Skills You Will Need 12+ years of experience in software engineering and system design, with at least 5+ years in principal engineer or architect roles Driving AI-enabled engineering transformation, including coding agents, agentic workflows, context and knowledge systems, automated testing, evaluations, and engineering guardrails. Architecting and scaling large distributed systems and platforms serving millions of users with demanding reliability and availability requirements. Building or leading shared platform capabilities adopted across multiple products, business lines, or engineering organisations. Leading cross-team architectural initiatives, influencing senior engineers and engineering leaders without relying on direct reporting authority. 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. 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.