Grab is hiring a Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh

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. 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 Singapore 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.