Software Engineer, Backend (AI)

Company Description

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.

Job Description

Get to Know the Team

Applied AI Team is a group of passionate engineers committed to architecting, crafting, and maintaining internal tooling systems, frameworks and platforms that elevate the very core of our business operations. With unyielding, we create functional applications that not only enhance productivity but also redefine efficiency for Grab employees. Join us in this journey as we pioneer the future of technology, pushing the boundaries of what's possible to shape Grab's success.

Get to Know the Role

As a Software Engineer on our team, you will be the technical backbone of LLM-Kit, Grab's framework for building, deploying, and monitoring LLM and agentic applications, and the standard starting point through which teams across the organization ship AI products. You will build the libraries, scaffolding, and CLI that give engineers a paved road from empty repo to a production LLM service: pre-configured FastAPI project structure, a default ReAct agent with MCP integration, GrabGPT connectivity, Vault-backed secret management, auth helpers, guardrails, built-in observability, and evaluations wired in out of the box.

You will report to the Engineering Manager and work onsite at the Grab Office.

This role is onsite based in our Petaling Jaya, Malaysia office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Develop Framework Features End-to-End

Independently build complex library and tooling features, agent and MCP integrations, scaffolding templates, CLI subcommands, config and secret management, auth helpers, guardrails, and evaluation hooks, from conception through release and adoption.

• Design Clean and Composable Abstractions

Design the abstractions teams build on: clean, composable interfaces over LangChain, LangGraph, FastAPI, and MCP adapters.

• Build Well-Architected Python Libraries and CLIs

Build well-architected Python libraries and CLIs (and Go where it fits Grab's tooling), with rigorous packaging and dependency hygiene on uv, strict semantic versioning, backwards compatibility guarantees, and consistent API conventions across the SDKs.

• Implement Quality and Governance Layers

Build and operate the platform's quality and governance layers: OpenTelemetry distributed tracing and Datadog metrics baked into generated services, structured logging, Vault secret injection, OIDC/workload-identity authentication, prompt-level guardrails against common adversarial attacks.

• Ensure Framework Reliability and Support

Ensure the framework is for the teams that depend on it. Participate in on-call and support rotations, triage breakages in scaffolding, dependency, and deployment paths, conduct root cause analysis, and be part of post-mortems.

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• 2+ years of professional software development experience with a history of delivering successful solutions. Fresh Graduates are welcome.
• Proficiency in server-side programming, specifically Python and Golang.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs (Large Language Models), LangChain, and LangGraph for conversational AI development.
• Practical experience with cloud providers (AWS), containerization (Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Grasp of data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and multi-threading.
• An advocate for automated testing (unit, integration) and writing concise technical documentation.
• Experience with a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle

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.

What We Stand For at Grab

We are committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace that enables diverse Grabbers to grow and perform at their best. As an equal opportunity employer, we consider all candidates fairly and equally regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, family commitments, physical and mental impairments or disabilities, and other attributes that make them unique.