Lead Software Engineer, Scribe Backend

About the role

Scribe is Grab's in-house app instrumentation and insights platform, capturing and processing user clickstream activity across all Grab apps at petabyte scale. It powers observability, experimentation, real-time personalisation and business analytics. The Scribe backend team is based in Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City and works closely with Mobile Platform, Product Analytics, Data Warehouse and Developer AI teams. The Lead Software Engineer sets the technical direction, owns the architecture, cost and reliability, and mentors a team of senior engineers and interns, reporting to the Engineering Manager in Singapore and working onsite at the One-North office.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture and roadmap of Scribe's backend: ingestion gateway, event-lifecycle services, streaming and data-lake pipelines, and the APIs behind the Scribe Portal and Scribe MCP.
• Lead Project MEGA to completion: typed specs, producer-side validation, CI guardrails and agent-driven migration of legacy events across Grab's Tech Families.
• Design and deliver the governed clickstream data layer and event vocabulary powering funnel analytics and user-understanding use cases.
• Run the platform cost programme: event lineage, automated deprecation, retention policy, gateway right-sizing and legacy stream retirement, with chargeback to producing teams.
• Write RFCs, drive cross-team technical decisions and represent Scribe in architecture and operational-excellence reviews.
• Own operational excellence: on-call process, incident response, post-mortems, fire drills, SLA and data-loss monitoring.
• Lead an engineering team with diverse technical stacks and grow the next technical leads.

Required profile

• Undergraduate degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science or a related field.
• At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including as a technical lead or architect for a platform used by many teams.
• Experience developing large-scale backend and streaming systems, with an understanding of the trade-offs for high-load, low-latency systems.
• Experience defining and enforcing data contracts or schemas across many producer teams, including versioning, migration and deprecation.
• Experience owning cloud cost for a large data platform on AWS: attribution, retention, right-sizing and measured savings.

Required skills

• Proficient in Go, or willing to learn it, with hands-on experience in Python or Scala.
• Web portal: React.js and Golang backend.
• Ingestion and streaming: high-throughput Go gateway services, Kafka, Apache Flink.
• Data processing and storage: Apache Spark, Trino, StarRocks, Hive, Iceberg / Delta Lake on AWS.
• Applied AI: LLM agents for code migration and spec generation, MCP servers, Python backend.
• Optional but a big plus: experience with Apache Flink and Spark, LLM agents in engineering workflows, mobile analytics instrumentation, CI/CD tools, Terraform and Kubernetes.

What we offer

• Term Life Insurance and comprehensive medical insurance.
• GrabFlex benefits package tailored to individual needs.
• Parental and birthday leave, plus LASA volunteering leave.
• Confidential Grabber Assistance Programme.
• FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours.