Sign in

By Adrian Popovici, Zsolt Vadaszi, Adrian Margin, Hannes Kruppa

Image Collection Using KartaView

A few years ago, we realised a strong demand to better understand the streets where our driver-partners and consumers go, with the purpose to better fulfil their needs and also, to quickly adapt ourselves to the rapidly changing environment in the Southeast Asian cities.

One way to fulfil that demand was to create an image collection platform named KartaView which is Grab Geo’s platform for geotagged imagery. It empowers collection, indexing, storage, retrieval of imagery, and map data extraction.

KartaView is a public, partially open-sourced product, used both internally and externally…


At Grab, the Lending team is focused towards building products that help finance various segments of users, such as Passengers, Drivers, or Merchants, based on their needs. The team builds products that enable users to avail funds in a seamless and hassle-free way. In order to achieve this, multiple lending microservices continuously interact with each other. Each microservice handles different responsibilities, such as providing offers, storing user information, disbursing availed amounts to a user’s account, and many more.

In this tech blog, we will discuss what Data and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) pipelines are and how they are used…

Grab a coffee ☕️, sit back and enjoy reading. 😃

Wanna know how we improved our app’s build time performance and developer experience at Grab? Continue reading…

Where it all began

Imagine you are working on an app that grows continuously as more and more features are added to it, it becomes challenging to manage the code at some point. Code conflicts increase due to coupling, development slows down, releases take longer to ship, collaboration becomes difficult, and so on.

Grab superapp is one such app that offers many services like booking taxis, ordering food, payments using an e-wallet, transferring money to friends/families, paying…


The Grab support team plays a key role in ensuring our users receive support when things don’t go as expected or whenever there are questions on our products and services.

In the past, when users required real-time support, their only option was to call our hotline and wait in the queue to talk to an agent. But voice support has its downsides: sometimes it is complex to describe an issue in the app, and it requires the user’s full attention on the call.

With chat messaging apps growing massively in the last years, chat has become the expected support channel…


Market-Store is an in-house developed general purpose feature store that is used to serve real-time computed machine learning (ML) features. Market-Store has a stringent SLA around latency, throughput, and availability as it empowers ML models, which are used in Dynamic Pricing and Consumer Experience.


As Grab continues to grow, introducing new ML models and handling increased traffic, Market-Store started to experience high latency. Market-Store’s SLA states that 99% of transactions should be within 200ms, but our latency increased to 2 seconds. This affected the availability and accuracy of our models that rely on Market-Store for real-time features.

Latency Issue

We used different…


In Grab, the Trust, Identity, Safety, and Security (TISS) is a team of software engineers and AI developers working on fraud detection, login identity check, safety issues, etc. There are many TISS services, like grab-fraud, grab-safety, and grab-id. They make billions of business decisions daily using the Griffin rule engine, which determines if a passenger can book a trip, get a food promotion, or if a driver gets a delivery booking.

There is a natural demand to log down all these important business decisions, store them and query them interactively or in batches. Data analysts and scientists need to use…

In the first part of this blog post, you’ve read about the improvements made to our build and staging deployment process, and how plenty of manual tasks routinely taken by engineers have been automated with Conveyor: an in-house continuous delivery solution.

This new post begins with the introduction of the hermeticity principle for our deployments, and how it improves the confidence with promoting changes to production. Changes sent to production via Conveyor’s deployment pipelines are then described in detail.

In previous articles (see Grab’s in-house chat platform, workforce routing), we shared how chat has grown to become one of the primary channels for support in the last few years.

With continuous chat growth and a new in-house tool, helping our agents be more efficient and productive was key to ensure a faster support time for our users and scale chat even further.

Starting from the analysis on the usage of another third-party tool as well as some shadowing sessions, we realised that building a templated-based feature wouldn’t help. …

Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, is a hyperlocal three-sided marketplace that operates across hundreds of cities in Southeast Asia. Grab started out as a taxi hailing company back in 2012 and in less than a decade, the business has evolved tremendously and now offers a diverse range of services for consumers’ everyday needs.

To fuel our business growth in newer service offerings such as GrabFood, GrabMart and GrabExpress, user acquisition efforts play a pivotal role in ensuring we create a sustainable Grab ecosystem that balances the marketplace dynamics between our consumers, driver-partners and merchant-partners.

Part of our user growth strategy…

Grab’s engineering teams currently own and manage more than 250+ microservices. Depending on the business problems that each team tackles, our development ecosystem ranges from Golang, Java, and everything in between.

Although there are centralised systems that help automate most of the build and deployment tasks, there are still some teams working on different technologies that manage their own build, test and deployment systems at different maturity levels. Managing a varied build and deploy ecosystems brings their own challenges.

Build Challenges

  • Broken external dependencies.
  • Non-reproducible builds due to changes in AMI, configuration keys and other build parameters.
  • Missing security permissions…


Southeast Asia’s leading Online to Offline (O2O) mobile platform, providing the everyday services that matter most to consumers.

Get the Medium app
