Distinguished Engineer, Architecture & Engineering Excellence

Job Description Get to Know the Team The Tech Strategy team is instrumental in defining the long-term Technology goals and growth strategy for the company, working directly with Co-Founders and Senior Technology Leadership. As a Distinguished Engineer focusing on Architecture & Engineering Excellence, you will be a technical authority and advisor to the CTO and Heads of Engineering. Your primary mission is to ensure that the Engineering and Data Science organizations have the architectural foundation, engineering rigor, and culture necessary to achieve the company's strategic technical vision and deliver systems for massive, global scale, efficiency, and reliability. Your scope of influence is the Overall Grab Tech Organization. Get to Know the Role You are a trusted technical leader, considered an authority on technical issues by both the technical and business community. You will focus on the most advanced, difficult, cross-cutting, and ambiguous technical challenges across Grab. This role defines deep, hands-on technical contribution, establishes company-wide technical direction, and acts as an Exemplary Practitioner to inspire technical excellence across the entire organization. Set the Grab-wide Technical Vision: Lead the definition and evangelization of a shared technical vision across all of Grab , pioneering new technical spaces and shaping the long-term technical strategy. Resolve Systemic Complexity: Solve Grab's most impactful and complex problems, resolving technical trade-offs that cut across Super-Tech Families (SuperTFs) and Grab's overall architecture. This includes resolving design challenges that span multiple technical domains (e.g., data engineering, software design, infrastructure). Drive Engineering Excellence & Culture: Develop company-wide coding principles, quality, and standards. Lead the cultural shift towards an "automation-first" mindset across engineering. Technical Incubation and Implementation involves serving as a hands-on leader. This leader designs and implements core components. Alternatively, they take on the Guide and Sponsor roles. In these roles, they ensure the most important, multi-quarter projects are architecturally sound and successfully landed. Mentorship and Advocacy: Develop the next generation of engineers, including formal mentoring for Principal and Senior Principal Engineers. Represent our engineering expertise in industry forums and serve as a technical thought leader. The Critical Tasks You Will Perform Architecture & Design Leadership: Proactively identify issues, promote and deliver changes to Grab's architecture that decrease coupling and improve productivity and stability. Resolve all Grab design challenges that cut across domains like data engineering, software design, and infrastructure. Hands-on Technical Leadership: You will be a Key Contributor to Grab's most mission-critical and foundational applications or libraries. Your role requires direct, hands-on contribution to these essential components, being an Exemplary Practitioner to establish and enforce the highest standards of coding excellence. Business-Tech Mapping: Understand Grab's business by applying appropriate technology to solve business problems, anticipating the evolution of both business and technology. Map architecture to ambiguous business problems. Organisational Improvement: Lead and create an overall quality risk analysis and mitigation plan for Grab. Think deeply about organizational issues and partner with Heads of Engineering to resolve cross-organization issues. Crisis & Unblocking: Be frequently consulted for making difficult trade-off decisions. Play the Tie Breaker role to accelerate progress by driving crisp decisions. Be a Catcher for projects that are technically off the rails. External Advocacy: Represent the company's engineering expertise in industry forums and serve as a thought leader. Qualifications What Essential Skills You Will Need Technical Mastery: Has an industry-recognized level of expertise in a chosen technical specialisation, consistently demonstrating proficiency across key technical competencies.This includes: Programming/Coding Principles: Active contributor to an industry-recognised application, library, or coding standard, or defining coding principles and quality at a Grab level. Technical Design: Ability to deliver solutions for large-scale, systemic, or technically nuanced problems. Non-Functional Requirements: Managing the stability, scalability, security or cloud costs roadmap for Grab. Strategic Impact: Proven ability to influence outcomes at the highest level of the organisation and effect change that has a substantial positive impact on Grab. Thought Leadership: Experience in representing the company at the industry level and proactively providing critical insights that influence company-wide technology decisions and investments. Self-Starter: A self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity, takes the initiative to challenge the status qu