Senior Principal Engineer, Business Platform & AI Architecture at Grab

Get to Know the Team BECO (Business Ecosystem) powers a broad set of shared business platforms across Grab, including merchant platforms, search and personalization, ads and monetization, transaction systems, and selected enterprise capabilities. These platforms support multiple Grab businesses and operate at significant scale. The organisation is entering a new phase of platform evolution. Our priorities include increasing engineering leverage through AI, improving platform cohesion across historically separate domains, and enabling faster incubation of new business capabilities without creating unnecessary fragmentation or long-term technical debt. Get to Know the Role We are hiring a Senior Principal Engineer to help shape the technical direction of the organisation. You will work across areas such as search, recommendations, ads, merchant experience, order management, and shared business platform capabilities. The work will require both strategic judgment and hands-on depth: understanding existing systems quickly, identifying the highest-leverage opportunities, and helping teams move from problem definition to execution. We are looking for someone who is strong in platform architecture, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to balance long-term technical quality with practical delivery needs. You will report to the Head of Engineering, Business Ecosystem. The Critical Tasks You Will Perform • Drive cross-organisation technical initiatives: You will help define and lead technical work that spans multiple teams or domains. This includes identifying fragmentation, setting architecture direction, and driving execution on problems that do not fit neatly within a single team. • Improve AI adoption in engineering workflows: A key part of this role is helping the organisation apply AI in practical, measurable ways. This may include AI-assisted development workflows, agentic automation for repetitive engineering tasks, test-backed migration or transformation workflows, and engineering guardrails that improve quality and speed. We are looking for applied engineering judgment, not AI demos. • Support platformisation across business domains : You will help unify shared capabilities across areas such as search, personalization, ads, promo, merchant platforms, and transaction systems. This includes reducing duplicated platform logic, improving shared data and system design, and helping leaders decide what should be centralized versus what should remain domain-owned. • Contribute to 0-to-1 initiatives: Some of the organisation's priorities involve building new capabilities quickly. You will help shape MVP architecture, define sensible milestones, unblock execution, and make pragmatic technical tradeoffs so teams can move fast without creating avoidable long-term issues. • Raise technical quality in the areas you influence: Depending on the initiative, you may also improve reliability, observability, scalability, rollout safety, and cost efficiency. We expect you to think beyond design documents and consider how systems operate in production.