Table of Content

• Introduction
• What is your role and your responsibilities?
• Why did you join Grab?
• What were the challenges you faced and how’d you overcome them?
• What did you do day-to-day
• How did you prepare for the interview?
• What was your greatest achievement in Grab?
• Would you recommend Grab to your juniors or batch mates?
• Were there any fun events or social activities at Grab?

Introduction

I believe you have heard of Grab – a leading superapp in Southeast Asia, best known for its ride-hailing, food delivery, and financial services. Founded in 2012, Grab started as a taxi-hailing app in Malaysia. Today, Grab operates in multiple countries, offering a wide range of services, including transportation, logistics, payments, and financial solutions, making everyday transactions more convenient for millions of users. This growth and innovation create exciting opportunities for internships at Grab. In this blog, we are hearing from Melody Koh Si Jie, a current data engineer intern in Grab, to explore what it’s like to work at Grab, sharing insights from real experiences. In this blog, she will share her experience in working as a full stack software engineer in Grab, however if you would like to know more about what it’s like to work as a data engineer intern, feel free to chat with her.

What is your role and your responsibilities?

I was a full stack software engineer intern working under the Grab For Business team (GFB). In GFB, the team is responsible for developing and enhancing solutions that cater to corporate clients. This includes designing automated invoice systems or integrating with corporate expense management platforms. My day to day task includes maintaining backend grPC microservices and implementing new apis for our feature. I am mainly working on backend in the team, but some of the tasks require frontend implementation, therefore I am also involved in developing the portal with React. Some of the key projects that I have worked on are data healing, prepaid topup reversal and migration of kafka ingestion pipeline as well as a huge project with the team, which is an employee revamption project.

Why did you join Grab?

Around that time, I wanted to find a company that offered immense growth opportunities and a strong learning environment, and Grab was hiring for interns around July, which fits well with my internship period that time. Grab’s engineering team has always been a pioneer in the tech industry. Joining Grab would definitely improve my software engineering skills and learn how to design large scaling systems as well as working with experienced engineers.

What were the challenges you faced and how’d you overcome then?

The biggest challenge I faced during my internship was definitely during the onboarding process in the first week. As an intern, I had limited permissions to access their internal tools and had to go through multiple stages to request for access. But thanks to the help from my team, I am able to tackle it. Additionally, I had no prior experience working with a large monorepo or using gRPC microservices. Understanding the codebase was initially difficult, as I struggled to grasp how different services interconnected. However, with the help from my team and by reading up on gRPC, protobufs, and Golang concurrency, I was able to gradually overcome these challenges and gain a better understanding of the concepts.

What was your day-to-day like?

My day to day workload involves maintaining backend services, implementing new apis and fixing bugs. Besides that, we have 2 standups every week, occurring on Monday and Thursday to update on our progress and address any issues you face with the task. Occasionally, there will be some meetings with the products team to understand the products requirement and align development efforts accordingly, ensuring that the implemented features meet business needs and user expectations. Besides developing, there has been tons of reading through documentations, understanding how Grab’s authentication services works, reading on how our team design’s large scale systems with cloud services and how to implement through it

How did you prepare for the interview?

Grab’s interview for interns involves 3 stages, which are HR Phone call interview, Technical round interview and finally Behavioral interview. Since the technical interview involves live coding assessment, I grind through leetcode and revise on data structures and algorithm skill sets. Meanwhile for Behavioral interview, I research on the common questions that will be asked online, which provides me with further preparation on top of that.

What was your greatest achievement in Grab?

Greatest achievement for me was definitely whenever I completed a project. As a SWE, one of the most rewarding moments is seeing your work in action. Each project taught me critical aspects of SWE thinking, like optimizing database performance, addressing caching issues, minimizing latency, and ensuring scalable solutions. It would be an understatement to say that I have learned a lot from my team. I also got the chance to collaborate with other teams like QA, Penetration Testing, Product, and Analytics team, which pushed me to think from their perspectives too, whether it was securing API endpoints or ensuring product scalability. Another exciting milestone for me was securing a second internship in Grab

Would you recommend Grab to your juniors or batch mates?

DEFINITELY!! The overall culture in Grab was amazing, the workplace environment is amazing, the colleagues are friendly and willing to guide whenever you need help. Most importantly, it’s the growth improvement. If you are looking to gain hands-on experience in building scalable solutions or working with cutting-edge technologies in a collaborative environment, they provide a great platform for you to learn.

Were there any fun events or social activities at Grab?

The company will host monthly bonding activities for all the interns where we have been going for bowling activities, roller skating and many more. There are also activities during festive seasons like Chinese new year and Deepavali for all the employees to celebrate. Sports activities were held weekly too, whether it was for badminton, basketball or tennis. If you are a full timer working under the tech family, occasionally they also have activities like going to a waterpark.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Nothing much else. Here’s a picture of me at the grab office 😀

And that’s a wrap for this blog! Got questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out! You can connect with Melody on LinkedIn.

Until next time! ✌️