Lead Software Engineer, Backend

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 the Team

The Credit Risk team within the Lending vertical plays an important role in building secure, and reliable systems that assess and manage risk throughout the borrower lifecycle. Our mission is to evaluate user risk, perform realtime risk checks, and manage user credit limits, offers, and profiles in high-throughput environments, while also supporting lender management and credit bureau integrations.

We design scalable, fault-tolerant services that power credit decisioning for millions of users across Southeast Asia. Core engineering principles such as data consistency, idempotency, and distributed systems are deeply ingrained in our architecture, ensuring the integrity of every transaction.

Get to Know the Role

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to join the Credit Risk team in the Lending vertical. In this role, you will design, develop, and maintain critical backend components and services that enable intelligent credit decisioning, real-time risk evaluation, and scalable loan management.

You will work closely with product, data, and business teams to deliver high-quality solutions that ensure accuracy, compliance, and reliability across the lending ecosystem. As a technical leader, you will champion engineering best practices such as code reviews, automated testing, static analysis, feature flagging, and versioned APIs to drive excellence and consistency across teams.

A key part of your responsibility will be designing and evolving system architecture for high-throughput, low-latency services that process risk checks, credit limit updates, and integrations with bureaus. This is an onsite role based in Jakarta. You will be reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Identify, propose, and lead technical initiatives that improve system reliability, performance, and efficiency, fostering innovation within the team.
• Drive key initiatives from inception to completion, ensuring alignment across cross-functional stakeholders and accountability for project outcomes.
• Take end-to-end ownership of the systems you build—from design and deployment to monitoring and continuous optimization—ensuring they remain reliable, secure, and scalable.
• Play a key role in technical discussions, elevating engineering standards by providing deep, actionable insights that guide design and implementation decisions.
• Ensure delivery of well-structured, maintainable, and production-ready code, taking full ownership of the end-to-end development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with SRE and DevOps teams to design, optimize, and maintain scalable microservices infrastructure, ensuring high availability and resilience.
• Participate in on-call rotations, proactively identifying and resolving system issues to ensure service stability and continuous improvement.

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of professional experience, with 5+ years in designing and building scalable backend systems. Proficiency in Java or Golang.
• Hands-on experience in building and operating backend systems leveraging DBMS, caching frameworks, NoSQL data stores, and application servers. Exposure to cloud-native architectures and distributed systems design.
• Deep understanding of system performance optimization, scalability principles, and techniques for building resilient, high-throughput services.
• Prior experience in developing financial or banking systems, particularly in areas such as credit risk, lending, or consumer finance, will be a strong advantage.
• Proactively identify problems, think creatively, and balance engineering excellence with business impact to deliver pragmatic, high-quality solutions.

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.
• Balancing personal commitments and life's demands are made easier with our FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours

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.