Head of Engineering, Payments

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

At Grab Financial Group (GFin), we're building the future of payments in Southeast Asia. As Head of Payments Engineering, you will lead the end-to-end engineering organisation powering all payment experiences across the Grab ecosystem – from in-app wallet transactions and online checkouts, to in-store POS payments and acquiring services for merchants. This is a director-level role with a remit that spans both strategic direction and deep technical leadership.

Get to Know the Role

You will lead a large, distributed engineering team of 200+ experienced individuals across multiple countries, responsible for designing, building, and operating a full-stack payments platform at massive scale. Our solutions are mission-critical, operating 24/7 in some of the most dynamic and diverse markets in the world. Reliability, security, compliance, and speed are not optional – they are the baseline.

You will report to the Head of Engineering, GrabFin and work onsite at Grab Office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

In close partnership with product, business, and compliance leaders, you will co-own the strategy and roadmap, driving innovation, operational excellence, and platform efficiency. You will champion "platformization" – creating reusable, scalable capabilities that serve multiple markets and products – while pushing for growth, product excellence, and the use of AI-driven solutions to transform our offerings.

You will set the bar high for engineering culture, fostering ownership, skillfulness, and continuous improvement. This means inspiring your leaders, growing future talent, refining processes, and ensuring our technology choices position us ahead of the curve.

If you thrive in high-growth environments, love the challenge of building world-class systems at scale, and can bridge the gap between long-term vision and hands-on execution, this is your opportunity to shape the payments landscape for millions of users across Southeast Asia.

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Extensive payments domain expertise – proven experience in building and operating large-scale payment systems, including issuer and acquirer platforms, online/offline payments, and wallet-based ecosystems.
• Deep understanding of the payments value chain – familiarity with payment networks, settlement and reconciliation, fraud prevention, KYC/AML, risk management, and regional regulatory landscapes in Southeast Asia.
• Proven ability to translate business models into technical architectures that enable growth, monetization, and compliance without compromising scalability or reliability.
• Hands-on experience with modern payment technology stacks – including backend architectures (microservices, GoLang, AWS), mobile payment integrations, tokenization, encryption, and real-time transaction processing.
• Track record of building resilient, high-availability systems capable of handling high transaction volumes with zero downtime in mission-critical environments.
• Strong product partnership skills – able to co-create roadmaps with product and business teams, aligning technical investments with evolving market opportunities and customer needs.
• Leadership across diverse geographies – experienced in managing and scaling multi-country engineering teams, fostering collaboration across time zones and cultures.
• Operational and compliance excellence – proven ability to implement best practices in observability, SLAs, security, data governance, and regulatory reporting.
• Commercial acumen in payments – understanding of unit economics, cost optimization (e.g., interchange fees, processing costs), and partnership models with banks, schemes, and merchants.
• Innovation mindset – track record of applying AI, analytics, and emerging payment technologies to improve performance, personalization, and operational efficiency.

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 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.