Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh

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 our Team

The Service Mesh Engineering team is a dynamic and experienced group responsible for developing our service mesh infrastructure, which forms the backbone of our microservice architecture. We help manage service-to-service connectivity, securing traffic, providing observability metrics, and enhancing service through proper use of Hystrix, timeouts, and rate limiting. Our team collaborates, using expertise in networking, infrastructure, microservices, and more.

Get to know the Role

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to guide the technical direction and execution of our service mesh platform — the foundation of service-to-service communication across our microservices architecture. You will be reporting to Senior Software Engineering Manager. You will oversee the architecture and roadmap of the platform, lead a team of engineers, and partner with other teams across the organization to deliver a secure, observable, and scalable mesh. You will also expect to guide how the team uses AI tooling to accelerate engineering velocity.

This is a senior technical leadership role with influence over platform direction, engineering practices, and how the team operates day-to-day.

This role is onsite based in our Petaling Jaya, Malaysia office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

Technical leadership

• You will define and lead the multi-year technical strategy for the service mesh platform, including data plane and control plane evolution, capability roadmap, and migration paths from legacy systems.
• You will architect, and review complex changes to the mesh infrastructure (Istio, Envoy or equivalent), with a emphasis on reliability, scalability, and security.
• You will manage platform-wide concerns: traffic management, service discovery, mTLS and identity, observability, rate limiting, and cross-cluster communication.
• You will lead architecture decisions that cross team boundaries, and represent the mesh platform in cross-organization technical forums.

Execution and delivery

• Break down ambiguous, multi-quarter plans into concrete deliverables and lead the team through execution.
• Guide critical incident response and root-cause analysis for mesh-level outages; ensure long-term fixes land, not just mitigations.
• Ensure: capacity planning, performance tuning, SLO definition, and proactive monitoring of mesh health.

People and team

• Mentor junior and senior engineers on technical depth, system design, and platform thinking.
• Conduct technical reviews, contribute to hiring, and help grow the team's overall capability.

AI adoption and engineering velocity

• Promote the use of AI-assisted engineering tools (coding assistants, code review, incident analysis, documentation generation) within the team, and set the bar for how the team uses them.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI in operational workflows — incident assessment, log analysis, runbook automation, alert correlation, configuration generation — and lead the implementation of high-value applications.
• Build internal patterns and shared infrastructure (prompts, MCP integrations, agents, evals) that promote collaboration in a measurable way.

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You will Need

• You have Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• You have 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years working on distributed systems, networking, or platform infrastructure.
• You have deep, hands-on expertise with service mesh technologies — Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, Consul, or equivalent — including operating them at scale in production.
• You have experience with microservices networking: HTTP, TCP/IP, gRPC, TLS/mTLS, load balancing, and service discovery.
• You have track record leading the delivery of complex platform projects across multiple teams or quarters.
• You have proficiency in Go (preferred), Java, or Python, with experience contributing to or extending mesh-related open-source projects.
• You have expertise with Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• You have experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern observability stacks.
• You have promote AI tool adoption in an engineering team.

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.

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.