Making friends and making an impact

Eliza has been working at Grab for five years, nurturing her engineering career from the ground up and building life-long friendships in the process. 

Making friends and making an impact

To me, engineering is like creating art. When you’re a singer and you write a new album, that’s exciting and you’re proud of it, right? That’s what I feel like as an engineer.  Even if it’s a small feature – if that makes a difference to someone's life, I’ll be happy with what I’ve done. For example, we recently made a small change to increase the font size on the app. That might not sound like a big deal but we got a lot of feedback from our older merchant-partners and app users who said this really helped because they could see and use the app better. That’s a small change that, to me, had a big impact. That’s why I wanted to become an engineer… and a Grabber!

When I graduated from university I knew that Grab was the place to come to for a career in engineering because of how great the team is. I got hired straight out of college and started as a mobile engineer. But as I started doing automation tasks and testing things, I thought Quality Assurance Engineering might be the job for me. Fortunately, Grab has an internal mobility programme. So I spoke to my manager about it and she supported me and put me on my career path. So now, I’m a QA engineer, testing software to make sure it’s all running properly.

Grab has really lived up to my expectations. I’ve been surrounded by great role models since starting my career here and I’m confident that I’m on course to become a great engineer. Everyone is supportive, and the culture is so geared towards learning. I’ve also been able to make great friends here – in fact, my colleagues are some of my best friends! 

Recently, I went to Bali with a few other Grabbers – we used our time off to go away together as friends. And before the pandemic, we went to Singapore too. We were all in the same team, so after successfully releasing a new feature, we took a break together to celebrate. From the time I started at Grab I made really close friendships with my colleagues because we interacted at work every day and after work, we might go to the cinema, and maybe do something together on the weekend. And even though we’re no longer on the same team, we’re all still very close. 

I’m still making friends every day – even virtually! Now, I work with people all over the world as my team is mostly based outside of Indonesia. Having an international team like this is a great opportunity because I learn a lot – not only about work or technical skills but also about other cultures, and I can even improve my English skills with them. 

So with that, I think my future is definitely at Grab. I still have a lot to learn, more adventures to go on with my friends, and more impact to create with my teammates – and that's something that really excites me.