Principal Engineer, Payments

Principal Engineer, Payments

• Team Engineering
• Location Singapore
• Job Type Full-time

The role at a glance

Get to Know the Team

At Grab Financial Group (GFin), we're building the future of payments in Southeast Asia. As Principal Engineer for Payments, you will lead the end-to-end engineering organization 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.

Get to Know the Role

As a Principal Engineer for Payments at Grab, you will be the technical driver behind the architecture and delivery of regional-scale payments platforms that power our consumer, driver, merchant, and enterprise ecosystems across Southeast Asia. You will design and ship fault-tolerant, compliant, and cost-efficient services that process high volumes of transactions across multiple countries, currencies, payment methods, and regulatory regimes.

You will partner closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, Finance, Operations, and country teams to build platform capabilities spanning authorization, capture, settlement, reconciliation, disbursements/payouts, refunds and disputes, as well as wallets and real-time bank transfers. You will set the technical vision, lead complex multi-quarter initiatives, and raise engineering quality across the organization through design leadership, hands-on implementation, and mentorship.

You will report to the Head of Engineering, Payments.

Worktype: 5-day onsite at Grab One-North office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Own design and delivery of mission-critical payment systems with high availability, low latency, and strict correctness.
• Define core payments architecture and drive platformization with clear domains, stable APIs, event contracts, data models, and versioning.
• Build resilient integrations to card networks, banks, APMs, and real-time rails that tolerate changes and outages.
• Champion reliability, observability, security, compliance, scalability, operability, and cost with SRE and Security, and lead chaos tests, DR, and incidents.
• Lead regionalization across currency, localization, regulation, and scheme needs with safe rollouts and migrations.
• Make pragmatic, data-driven decisions that balance impact, speed, and maintainability, and align stakeholders on trade-offs.
• Author and review design docs/RFCs, lead architecture reviews, set coding/testing standards, and elevate service.
• Lead by example with prototypes and critical-path builds, mentor senior and staff engineers, and scale best practices and culture.

Read more Skills you need

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Bachelor's in Computer Science or related is required; a Master's is preferred.
• 10+ years in software, including 5+ in senior/lead roles delivering complex systems.
• Advanced in Java, Go, or Python, with strong coding and testing discipline.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and microservices: decomposition, reliability, scale.
• Extensive hands-on work in payments (auth/capture, settlement, recon, ledger, payouts, refunds/disputes, orchestration) with correctness and idempotency.
• Strong SQL/NoSQL skills with solid financial data modeling, consistency, and reconciliation.
• Proven integrations with card networks, banks, APMs, and real-time rails using patterns.
• Solid grounding in security and compliance: PCI DSS, encryption/KMS, privacy, and KYC/AML.
• Significant AWS/Azure/GCP experience, including multi-region, multi-tenant, and cost efficiency.
• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and tools: CI/CD, IaC, observability, incident response, and SLOs.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and cross-team leadership to drive multi-quarter delivery.

Read more What we offer

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.

Read more Life at Grab

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.

Read more

What’s it like to work at Grab?

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Principal Engineer, Payments

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View our location

Nestled in the vibrant heart of Singapore is Grab's Global HQ! Take a tour of our office here, meet some of our teams and find out what it’s like to work in this vibrant cosmopolitan.

Meet the Engineering team

From software developers to security specialists, our people thrive on experimenting with fresh ideas and implementing them for users. Solve real-world problems, find purpose in your work and work across borders to help drive Southeast Asia forward.

Engineering at Grab is synonymous with holding yourself accountable for impacting the lives of millions of partners, be it drivers, passengers or merchants. Every line of code can have a big positive or negative impact on our consumers, which is why every little change requires thorough thought processes and a deep understanding of systems and scale.

“ ” Gaurav KumarSoftware Engineering Manager II

Learning within the Engineering team never stops, especially with the sponsored learning resources. You need to stay curious and be willing to take ownership to join and succeed in the team.

“ ” Zou YunEngineering Manager

Everybody at Grab understands the necessity of balance. We all believe that what we’re doing here is important, we’re genuinely changing people’s lives for the better, but we also understand that this shouldn’t come at the cost of your personal life.

“ ” Akanksha ValechaEngineering Manager II, Fullstack

The Application Process

What can you expect when you apply for a role at Grab? Here’s what our hiring process looks like.

Step 1: Apply.

We have a range of open roles from Marketing to Engineering and everything in between. Find the one that’s best for you and show us why you’re our next teammate.

Step 2: Getting to know you.

Next, you’ll have a video or phone interview with one of our recruiters to chat about you, the role, and your past work experiences.

Step 3: Testing, testing… 123.

Some roles might require assessments and/or a technical competency interview. For other roles, there might be an additional interview – speak with your recruiter for application details.

Step 4: Is it a culture match?

Finally, we’ll find out how we fit together, if your career vision aligns with our mission, how you embody the 4 H's, and your working style and personality.

Grab a spot in our talent community

Want to be the first to know about Grab opportunities? Keen to stay up-to-date with our latest revelations? Ready to learn more about life at Grab and our amazing teams?

Join our talent community and you’ll never miss a beat.

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