Head of Engineering, AI Transformation

PLT engineering GmbH; Singapore; On-site; SGD 210,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Grab is seeking a senior individual contributor to lead CXI's architectural direction and AI-driven engineering at scale. You will partner with senior engineers, product leaders, and data scientists to raise the bar for large-scale distributed systems and to create common platforms that accelerate autonomy.

Reporting to the Head of Technology, Integrity & COREX, you will shape the lifecycle from requirements through deployment, embed GenAI, establish guardrails, and empower autonomous teams

Responsibilities

• Transform the Software Development Lifecycle with AI
• Architect Systems for Massive Scale and Reliability
• Build Common Platforms Across the Grab Ecosystem
• Enable Autonomous Teams While Maintaining Architectural Coherence
• Drive Technical Influence Across CXI Leadership

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.

We are a team of builders working at the intersection of scale, reliability, and AI-native engineering — solving problems that matter for hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia.

Get to Know the Role

At the Head of Engineering level, this position is a senior 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 that allow teams to move faster with greater autonomy.

You will partner with senior engineers, engineering leaders, product leaders, and data scientists to drive technical direction across CXI through architectural clarity, deep technical craft, and enabling others to succeed.

You will report to the Head of Technology, Integrity & COREX.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

1. Transform the Software Development Lifecycle with AI

You will lead CXI's shift from isolated AI tools toward a fully AI-native engineering model by shaping the architecture, platforms, and practices needed to embed AI and autonomous agents throughout the software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, operations, and incident response. You will leverage GenAI to design evaluation frameworks, guardrail systems, and context/knowledge systems that make higher-autonomy engineering safe and scalable, enabling teams to operate with faster feedback loops and significantly higher engineering leverage.

2. Architect Systems for Massive Scale and Reliability

• You will provide architectural leadership for high-throughput, highly available distributed systems powering critical consumer and integrity experiences.
• Using AI-assisted design and analysis tools, you will help teams solve hard problems around scalability, reliability, resilience, performance, security, and cost — establishing architectural patterns that prevent systemic failures rather than solving reliability one incident at a time.

3. Build Common Platforms Across the Grab Ecosystem

• You will identify where capabilities should remain domain-specific and where they should become shared platform primitives — creating leverage across mobility, food delivery, e-commerce, financial services, and digital products.
• You will use GenAI to accelerate platform design, documentation, and adoption — solving difficult platform problems once and enabling many teams to build on top of them.

4. Enable Autonomous Teams While Maintaining Architectural Coherence

• You will establish reference architectures, engineering principles, reusable patterns, and technical guardrails that allow teams to make decisions independently.
• For the hardest cross-cutting problems, you will go deeper — helping 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 you.

5. Drive Technical Influence Across CXI Leadership

• You will serve as a trusted technical voice for senior engineers, engineering leaders, and product leaders — communicating complex architectural trade-offs clearly, shaping long-term technical strategy, and representing CXI engineering standards in cross-functional and company-wide forums.
• You will use AI tools to synthesise technical signals, model scenarios, and accelerate the preparation of architectural proposals and decision artefacts.