What Grab’s tech teams learned from its first developer conference

With eight research and development centers spread across the globe, Southeast Asian super app Grab has thousands of engineering and data whizzes working on its product lines for deliveries, mobility, and financial services.

As Grab continues to grow its international pool of talent across different geographical locations, time zone differences also affect engineering sharing and demonstration sessions.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made international travel and large-scale conferences near impossible, so the company organized a virtual event for its tech and engineering staff. Called Grab I/O, the online gathering brought employees together so they could share their unique working experiences and network across teams.

Referring to the many gears and cogs running behind the app’s simplified user experiences, Adam Seyer, Grab’s head of engineering (APEX) and chief organizer of the conference, succinctly summarizes the main point of the event.

“Grab I/O is really for those who have a passion to see the technological magic that happens to power the experiences Grab provides,” he says.

It takes a village

To pull off this landmark event, a core organizing team within Grab was formed to take care of key logistics and needs, from speaker management and swag design to production details and recreating the live conference experience online.

Grab head of engineering (APEX) Adam Seyer’s set up for Grab I/O / Photo credit: Grab

The core team was also joined by an additional group of Grab employees who supported the entire endeavor from behind the scenes – no small feat, given that over 1,500 participants were in attendance.

“It was amazing to see Grabbers from all around the world banding together to ensure that the programming was smooth and that the audiences were highly engaged,” Seyer recalls.

A forum of ideas

The event covered topics relevant to engineering and tech professionals, from workplace diversity to Grab’s latest developments in the areas of customer safety and consumer experiences.

During a session led by Sharon Zhou, Grab’s head of engineering for transport, six female engineers came together to share their stories and journeys in engineering, discussing how they overcame challenges to make tangible contributions to cutting-edge tech. Valuable lessons included dedicating time to family and self-care as well as taking the risk of failure instead of being stagnant.

“Passion for technology is a gender-neutralizing force,” asserts Zhou. “This panel discussion was not about technology. It was about people.”

Sharon Zhou, head of engineering for transport, leading a discussion among fellow female colleagues at Grab I/O / Photo credit: Grab

In another key session, senior engineering manager Kyle Measner and senior data science manager Haitao Bao from Grab’s safety teams came together to discuss the company’s facial verification security processes, which have made significant headway in anticipating and preventing ever-evolving methods of fraud aimed at tricking facial recognition AI.

Having upgraded these services to be more widely applicable and resilient to external service outages, Grab is now working on an improved system to better manage the intensive computing demands of facial recognition, by adding fail-safes such as performance monitoring and redistribution modules.

Prevalent challenges in facial recognition were also highlighted, such as quality of phone cameras, the common use of headwear in certain cultures, and how AI models can be biased against other ethnicities that they are not programmed to recognize.

“At Grab, we have access to millions of local faces, which gives us very good competitive advantages in building the best hyperlocal face recognition models for Southeast Asia,” shares Bao. The company now has data on millions of faces to refine the accuracy of its models.

The biggest takeaway from the event, however, was how decisions made by teams in their direct line of work are more influential to the rest of the organization than they think. Tech teams striving to overcome similar problems or roadblocks may benefit or take inspiration from how their peers in other departments found suitable solutions while developing their products.

The event also included networking sessions – a conference staple and a crucial catalyst to the cross-pollination of ideas. To somewhat replicate the experience of unplanned encounters in the hallway and conversations with newly introduced peers during in-person conferences, Grab I/O randomly paired attendees with each other. This resulted in a college intern from Singapore getting connected with no less than Grab co-founder Hooi Ling Tan.

As head engineer Seyer fondly puts it: “It reminded us that we are ‘One Grab.’”

Take two?

Seyer reports that response to the event was “overwhelmingly positive,” with conversations about program topics lasting long after Grab I/O had concluded. Session recordings, which were saved and uploaded for later playback, were accessed and rewatched multiple times, weeks after the conference.

Seyer (top left) fielding questions to panelists during a Q&A session at Grab I/O / Photo credit: Grab

While the organizing team did not plan for Grab I/O to be a recurring event, the positive response and feedback offer encouragement for another iteration early next year. If it pushes through, Seyer hints at the possibility of opening up certain sessions to external guests, so that others can experience the event for themselves and partake in the knowledge shared.

“Grab’s many wins are on the hard work of every Grabber, old and new. The content that has been curated and shared in the conference is a testament to the many lessons Grabbers have gained and the real impact they have made in Southeast Asia,” adds Seyer. “We look forward to putting together a more compelling set of content in the next Grab I/O.”

Most importantly, he looks forward to seeing the next Grab I/O as a physical conference.

“Hopefully the world gets back to a place where we can safely do these types of events in real life,” he muses.

Grab is Southeast Asia’s “everyday, everything” app, providing mobility, logistics and financial services to millions of users across Southeast Asia. The tech giant aims to unlock Southeast Asia’s true potential by solving the problems that hinder progress for communities in the region.

Explore a career with Grab by visiting its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.