GrabTaxi to tap into US talent with new engineering center in Seattle

Ride-hailing company GrabTaxi has a pretty firm hand on the steering wheel when it comes to the Southeast Asia transportation space. Time, then, to make the leap across the ocean? Sounds drastic, but that’s what the Singapore-headquartered startup is doing, with the inauguration of a new engineering center in Seattle, Washington, USA.

The center will house a dedicated team of engineers that will complement the work done by teams at GrabTaxi’s Singapore- and Beijing-based research and development centers. It will be headed by Raman Narayanan, who has previously worked for Microsoft and is one of the company’s distinguished engineers. He is joining GrabTaxi as technical advisor and will also be in charge of hiring new talent for the Seattle location.

Placing the center in Seattle makes sense as it has a significant cloud computing infrastructure and is a pool of considerable engineering talent. Amazon Web Services is headquartered in the city, and Microsoft’s campus is just across the lake in Redmond.

The center will house a dedicated team of engineers that will complement the work of GrabTaxi’s other teams.

The Seattle center will attack problems related to big data, predictive analytics, machine learning, storage, and so on. “We’re not going to partition off a piece of what Seattle does, we will have engineers who participate in every aspect of [GrabTaxi’s] technology on the cloud side,” Raman tells Tech in Asia. “You should really think of this as an extension of the engineering team [in Asia].”

Work at the center will focus mainly on the GrabTaxi technology back end, meaning that the results of the team’s efforts might not be immediately visible to users of the app. However, user experience is expected to improve in some key ways.

“Some of the infrastructure work we’re doing helps us to predict when the demand is going to occur before it does, so we can have our drivers go to that location even before the demand spikes up,” Arul Kumaravel, GrabTaxi VP of engineering, tells Tech in Asia. This will provide a better experience for the users and will benefit the drivers as well, he claims.

Seattle, you’ve got talent

The issue of finding and retaining quality engineering talent is a constant bugbear in Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems. GrabTaxi’s move will hopefully help the company tackle that problem. “Good engineering talent is hard to come regardless of where you are,” Arul says.

“Many of the engineers I spoke to in Seattle are excited about this opportunity to work in a startup and by solving problems for it, they also feel that they can have meaningful impact on people’s lives. For several reasons, many of them can’t relocate, and this provides an opportunity for them to work on this exciting problem without relocating to Singapore.”

Raman agrees. “It turns out that the idea of working for a Southeast Asian startup appeals to a lot of [engineers here],” he says. “They want to learn about the culture of a company in Southeast Asia, about the markets there – it’s an element of the job they really enjoy. So we expect to see constant cross-pollination.”

See: GrabTaxi’s journey to a billion-dollar startup (INFOGRAPHIC)