After Bangalore, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Seattle, and Singapore, Grab now opens a new Research and Development (R&D) centre in its hometown, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In line with the company’s commitment to nurturing its tech talent, Grab says it’s looking to hire 100 tech employees for its Kuala Lumpur R&D centre in its first year of operations, including software engineers, data scientists, and data analysts.
According to Grab’s head of engineering, Ditesh Gathani, the new R&D centre will focus on developing and enhancing real-time communications features such as VOIP calls via GrabChat, building new web products for Grab, as well as improving and developing new safety measures through machine learning. The arrival of this R&D centre gives “Malaysia’s top tech talents an opportunity to grow with Grab”, says the firm.
To keep pace with the company’s growth, Grab projects to add 1,000 new tech hires in next year regionally. In 2018, Grab has broadened its services into payments, as well as new verticals such as food, grocery, and parcel deliveries.
Today, Grab is operating in 235 cities in the region. As Grab plans to form more partnerships and services in the next 12 months, the company is focusing on developing GrabPlatform, which allows partners to integrate their services with Grab through APIs.
Theo Vassilakis, CTO of Grab, agreed that this expansion shows the company’s commitment to solving every day’s challenges as well as help boosting economies and people’s productivity, especially in Southeast Asia.
“At Grab, we don’t build tech for tech’s sake. We build to solve problems. That’s why we continue to fortify our team and invest in talent, to meet the scale of our ambition and the challenges we want to solve. Our decision to establish an R&D centre in Malaysia is an extension of our philosophy of developing highly localized solutions in the countries where our consumers live while tapping into the best specialised tech talent around the world,” Vassilakis says in an official statement.
Editor: Nadine Freischlad