Engineering Manager 2 - Data Platform

Job Description

Get to Know the Team

The Streaming Data team (a.k.a. Coban) ensures seamless and secure real-time access to continuous events or streams, serving as Grab's unified access pattern for real-time data. We build the infrastructure and platform for writing and consuming real-time data, and provide a cost-effective, managed NoOps service for product and data teams across Grab. We partner closely with sister teams in DataTech to provide integrated data platforms that unlock big data innovation every day.

Some examples of the team's work are shared publicly on the Grab Engineering blog:

• Building a self-serve streaming platform for Kafka topics, Flink, CDC pipelines, Kafka Connect, and notebooks (An elegant platform).
• Making Flink deployments safer through platform guardrails and production deployment patterns (Safer deployment of streaming applications).
• Enabling FlinkSQL exploration and productionisation so users can move faster from streaming ideas to running pipelines (The complete stream processing journey on FlinkSQL).
• Improving Flink release confidence with shadow testing (Enhancing Flink deployment with shadow testing).
• Strengthening real-time Kafka data quality with syntactic and semantic stream contracts (Real-time data quality monitoring).

These are examples of the platform thinking this role will continue to advance: taking complex real-time infrastructure problems and turning them into reliable, self-service capabilities for Grab teams.

Grab needs a manager to scale real-time data platforms

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.

The team turns streaming complexity into self-service platforms

The Streaming Data team, also known as Coban, owns Grab's real-time data platform. We build and operate the infrastructure that helps Grab teams write, process, govern, and consume continuous event streams safely at scale. Our platform brings together Kafka, Apache Flink, change data capture, Kafka Connect, notebooks, deployment guardrails, observability, and data quality capabilities so product and data teams can ship real-time pipelines with confidence.

The team partners closely with Kafka, data lake, metrics, governance, experimentation, and business-facing data teams across Data Engineering Platforms. We care deeply about platform leverage: making complex distributed systems reliable, efficient, secure, and easy enough for many internal users to adopt without creating operational toil.

The role owns people, platform direction, and production outcomes

As Engineering Manager II, Flink Platform, you will build, grow, and lead a Vietnam-based engineering team responsible for the evolution and operation of Grab's stream processing platform. You will guide the team roadmap, coach engineers, raise engineering standards, and partner with stakeholders across Grab to make Apache Flink a safer and more productive compute layer for real-time data.

You will work onsite at Grab Vietnam office in HCMC and report into Data Engineering Platforms leadership. This is a hands-on engineering management role. You are expected to stay close to technical design, reliability trade-offs, incident learning, and platform execution while scaling impact through your team.

This platform unlocks the real-time signals Grab needs next

• Apache Flink is a critical compute layer for real-time signals, automation, data products, and decision-making across Grab.
• A stronger Flink platform helps internal teams move from streaming ideas to production pipelines faster, with better guardrails and less operational risk.
• A small platform team must support many production workloads, so the manager will multiply impact through self-service workflows, reusable abstractions, and clear ownership models.
• As Grab accelerates AI-assisted and agentic engineering, high-quality real-time data becomes an even more important foundation for reliable automation.

Qualifications

You will lead delivery, reliability, and team growth

• Lead a team of Flink platform engineers in Vietnam, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Own quarterly planning, team objectives, prioritization, and delivery of the Flink platform roadmap in partnership with Data Engineering Platforms leaders and internal users.
• Set high engineering standards across system design, code quality, testing, documentation, operational readiness, security, and cost efficiency.
• Guide technical design for self-service Flink capabilities, deployment safety, production guardrails, observability, platform automation, and reusable libraries or modules.
• Drive operational excellence through on-call readiness, incident response, post-incident learning, service level objectives, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvement.
• Partner with Kafka, data lake, metrics, governance, SRE, security, and product engineering teams to make real-time pipelines reliable across Grab's broader data ecosystem.
• Represent the team with clear communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders, turning ambiguous platform needs into practical execution plans.

Strong candidates combine platform depth with management craft

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, data engineering, or platform engineering experience, with 3+ years managing engineers or leading engineering teams.
• Experience building, operating, or managing distributed systems, data platforms, stream processing platforms, or other high-scale backend infrastructure in production.
• Hands-on technical depth in Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, Kafka, or comparable large-scale data processing technologies.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, production operations, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and security practices for critical platforms.
• Proven ability to set roadmap, make prioritization calls under ambiguity, lead execution, and deliver measurable outcomes through a team.
• Experience coaching engineers, growing technical leaders, hiring strong talent, and building a collaborative team culture across seniority levels.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs and align multiple teams around platform direction.

Additional experience can help the team move faster

• Production experience with Apache Flink internals, high availability, checkpointing, state management, job upgrades, shadow testing, and safe deployment patterns.
• Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI, Go, Java, Scala, or infrastructure-as-code workflows.
• Experience building platform abstractions, SDKs, deployment tooling, control planes, self-service workflows, or managed NoOps services.
• Experience with data lake or warehouse technologies such as Spark, Parquet, Iceberg, Delta, Hudi, Trino, or Presto.
• Exposure to data governance, data quality, stream contracts, platform cost management, or multi-tenant data infrastructure.
• Curiosity about AI-assisted engineering and how high-quality real-time data can power safer automation across the company.

Grab supports sustainable performance

• 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 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 is made easier with our FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours.

Grab is committed to equal opportunity

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.

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.