Head of Engineering, Payments

Overview

Get to Know the Team and Role: 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.

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.

• Lead the end-to-end engineering organisation powering all payment experiences across the Grab ecosystem.
• Design, build, and operate a full-stack payments platform at massive scale with 24/7 reliability.
• Partner with product, business, and compliance leaders to co-own strategy and roadmap; drive innovation, operational excellence, and platform efficiency.
• Champion platformization — creating reusable, scalable capabilities that serve multiple markets and products — while advancing growth, product excellence, and AI-driven solutions.
• Set the bar for engineering culture, fostering ownership, continuous improvement, and strong talent development.
• Grow future talent, refine processes, and ensure technology choices position Grab ahead of the curve.
• Collaborate across geographies and time zones to lead multi-country engineering teams.

• 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.
• Ability to translate business models into technical architectures enabling growth, monetization, and compliance without compromising scalability or reliability.
• Hands-on experience with modern payment technology stacks – backend architectures (microservices, GoLang, AWS), mobile payment integrations, tokenization, encryption, and real-time processing.
• Track record of building resilient, high-availability systems capable of handling high transaction volumes with minimal downtime.
• Strong product partnership skills — co-creating roadmaps with product and business teams, aligning technical investments with market opportunities and customer needs.
• Leadership across diverse geographies — managing and scaling multi-country engineering teams, fostering collaboration across time zones and cultures.
• Operational and compliance excellence — observability, SLAs, security, data governance, and regulatory reporting.
• Commercial acumen in payments — understanding unit economics, cost optimization, and partnership models with banks, schemes, and merchants.
• Innovation mindset — applying AI, analytics, and emerging payment technologies to improve performance and efficiency.

• Term Life Insurance and comprehensive Medical Insurance.
• GrabFlex benefits package to suit needs and aspirations.
• Parental and Birthday leave; Love-all-Serve-all (LASA) volunteering leave.
• Grabber Assistance Programme for well-being.
• FlexWork arrangements to balance personal commitments.

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.