Engineering Manager II, Backend - Gateway platform

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

The Sentry team owns Grab's tier-0 API Gateway Platforms, sitting in the traffic path for almost every request between our apps, backend services, and external partners. We design, build, and operate our own API Gateway solution called T6, providing secure, reliable routing, traffic management, and service discovery so that millions of rides, deliveries, and payments just work. Our scope spans core gateway infrastructure, reliability engineering, and self-serve experiences that let product teams manage their own configs safely and at scale.

We are a distributed team across Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia, working closely with Cloud Infra, Security, and product engineering teams. Day to day, we partner with internal service owners by improving stability, simplifying migrations from legacy gateways to T6, and building self-serve tools, so engineers and service owners can ship changes faster with stronger guardrails. If you care about platform reliability, product thinking users, and leading teams through large-scale migrations and bold bets, you'll feel at home here.

Get to Know the Role

As an Engineering Manager II for the API Gateway Platform in the Sentry team, you will lead a high-impact platform group that keeps Grab's tier-0 gateways reliable, secure, and evolving. You will guide the team that is driving our journey from legacy API Gateway to T6, while continuously improving the developer experience and self-serve capabilities for internal service teams.

You will be accountable for setting the technical direction, aligning stakeholders, and building a strong engineering culture around ownership, operational excellence, and product thinking for internal users.

You will report to the Singapore-based hiring manager and work onsite at CMC Creative Space, HCMC.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Own the roadmap and execution for the API Gateway Platform, including migrations from legacy API Gateways to T6, new gateway capabilities, and deprecation of legacy paths.
• Drive reliability and operational excellence by shaping SLOs, on-call and incident practices, BCDR readiness, and guardrails that keep our gateways stable at scale.
• Partner with cross-functional teams (Cloud Infra, Security, product engineering and platform teams) to design and deliver gateway features such as authentication, routing, traffic management, and partner integrations.
• Build, grow, and coach the team, creating clear expectations, feedback loops, and growth plans so engineers can take end-to-end ownership of challenging platform work.
• Champion self-serve and great user experience, collaborating on self-serve tools, so service owners can safely manage their own configs with strong defaults and automation.
• Adopt AI-assisted development and automation where it makes sense, using it to speed up migrations, improve quality, and free the team to focus on

Qualifications

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years of backend development experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience, showcasing leadership, mentoring, and hands-on tech solutioning
• Strong engineering leadership in platform or infrastructure teams, with experience leading tier-0 / mission-critical systems and driving large cross-team initiatives end-to-end.
• Hands-on background in backend and platform engineering, with solid understanding of distributed systems, HTTP/gRPC, routing, and API design.
• Deep familiarity with cloud-native stacks (AWS or similar), including Kubernetes/AWS EKS, networking, load balancers, and observability (metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, alerts).
• Proven track record in reliability and operations: on-call leadership, incident management, BCDR, SLO/SLA design, and building guardrails that reduce MTTR and operational toil.
• Experience with gateway or edge platforms (e.g. Envoy, NGINX, API gateways) and an ability to reason about traffic management, authentication/authorization, and resiliency patterns.
• People management skills: hiring, coaching, and developing engineers; giving clear feedback; and creating a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication, able to align Cloud Infra, Security, product teams, and senior leaders on migration plans, risk, and timelines.
• Product mindset: empathy for users, ability to balance power vs simplicity, and experience building self-serve or developer tooling that scales across many teams.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development and automation, using tools to accelerate design, migration, and operations while keeping quality and safety high.
• Experience with version control systems like GitHub / GitLab and developing Git branching approaches.

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.