Senior Backend & Reliability Engineer

Job Description

Get to Know the Team

The Mobility team is an established team responsible for the ride-hailing module in the Grab app. We improve the core transport booking experience.

We are working on high throughput, real-time distributed systems that use machine learning techniques to solve hundreds of millions of requests per day. Our mission is to offer the best products and experiences to our passengers to increase adoption and engagement of our services. Our team has direct end-user contact, and impact on the bottom line for Grab.

Get to Know the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Backend to join our growing engineering team in Beijing, China. You will be reporting to Software Engineering Manager II and work at the intersection of backend product engineering and Site Reliability Engineering.

This role balances building new backend capabilities with improving the reliability, observability, and operational readiness of the services we own. Across an average quarter, you will spend approximately half your time on product and integration engineering, and half on reliability engineering. The split will flex around launches, incidents, and business priorities.

You will design, build, and operate backend systems that support Mobility at scale. You will work closely with Product, Operations, Analytics, partner-facing teams, and engineers across Grab to deliver reliable customer and partner experiences.

This role is onsite based in our Beijing, China office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• You will work with Product/Design/Analytics teams to understand problems, requirements, provide feedback, options, trade offs, and timelines.
• You will collaborate with Android/IOS/Backend/QA/ML Engineers to brainstorm and implement technical solutions that are scalable and addressing the actual problems.
• You will write code that is reusable, scalable and testable. Make sure features are delivered on time and with high quality.
• You will review code and engineering specs, provide constructive feedback and aim to raise the engineering bar.
• You will be responsible and responsive during on-call duty. Triage, debug, mitigate and fix complex issues. Assist on ad hoc queries from other teams.
• You will mentor junior engineers and contribute to the team's overall growth and knowledge sharing

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• You have Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field
• You have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience in distributed systems environments
• You have proficiency in at least one backend programming language (Go, C++, Python, or similar)
• You have experience with computer science fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, and system design principles
• You have experience designing and operating high-throughput or real-time distributed systems.
• You understand production failure modes, including partial failures, timeouts, retries, duplicate events, eventual consistency, and dependency degradation.
• You have solid knowledge of relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, or similar)
• You have hands-on experience with production observability, including metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, and runbooks.
• You understand reliability practices such as SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, safe deployments, rollback strategies, capacity planning, and postmortem follow ups.
• You have experience with cloud infrastructure, like AWS, and modern delivery practices such as CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure automation.
• You collaborate effectively across engineering and non-engineering functions, communicate technical trade-offs clearly, and take ownership of outcomes.

Additional Information

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.