Description
Grab is Southeast Asia's leading superapp, providing various services including food delivery, financial management, and ride-hailing.
As the Head Economist for Marketplace Strategy, you will be the architectural lead for the logic that powers our Dispatch, Pricing and/or Supply Planning systems. You sit at the intersection of economic theory, data science, and commercial strategy.
Responsibilities
Strategy & Domain Stewardship
- Architect Marketplace Mechanisms: Own the economic logic behind our core Dispatch, Pricing, and/or Supply Planning engines, as well as design incentive frameworks and clearing mechanisms that ensure market health.
- Shape the Roadmap: Own the strategic direction of our tech roadmap within your domain, using data-driven insights and hyper-local market understanding to define future priorities.
- Influence & Stakeholder Management: Provide strategic advice to country heads and functional leaders. Distill complex economic concepts into simple, actionable mental models to drive executive decision-making.
Team Leadership & Development
- Build & Scale: Lead, mentor, and grow a team of economists and data scientists. Foster a balancing technical rigor with personal career development.
- Drive Quality: Guide the team in applying experimental methods and structural modeling to ensure our biggest business bets are backed by rigorous, causal evidence rather than mere correlation.
- Manage Workload: Prioritize the team's research agenda to handle the most critical marketplace "unknowns",from long-run market dynamics to system efficiency frontiers,ensuring high morale and impact.
Technical Strategy & Innovation
- Bridge Theory and Reality: Oversee the translation of theoretical economic models into real-world applications within our dispatch and pricing algorithms.
- Advanced Analytics: Maintain oversight of the team's use of causal inference, structural modeling, and machine learning to decode complex user/partner behaviors.
- Experimentation: Design and lead high-stakes A/B testing and quasi-experimental frameworks to optimize dispatch logic and price elasticity, ensuring we move beyond simple metrics to understand "why" users make choices.
Qualifications
Essential Experience
- Leadership: Demonstrated experience building relationships across functional teams and leading a group of independent technical contributors.
- Strategic Depth: Ability to "see the forest for the trees," breaking down ambiguous, multi-year marketplace problems into manageable pieces.
- Communication: Good storytelling and presentation skills; comfortable presenting to senior stakeholders and capable of gaining buy-in during high-pressure meetings.
- Relevant Background: experience in marketplace design, pricing strategy, or economic consulting, within a high-velocity tech environment.
Technical Skills
- The Academic or Professional Foundation requires an advanced degree in Economics or a related quantitative field. We prefer a Master's or PhD, though we equally value equivalent, high-level professional experience that one has acquired.
- Causal Inference: Expertise in quasi-experimental methods (such as difference-in-differences or regression discontinuity) to decode complex behaviors and move beyond correlation.
- Data Proficiency: Good command of SQL and statistical programming (R or Python) to work with complex, high-velocity datasets.
Additional Information
Life at Grab
We care about your well-being at Grab, here are some of the global benefits we offer:
- We have your back with Term Life Insurance and comprehensive Medical Insurance.
- With GrabFlex, create a benefits package that suits your needs and aspirations.
- Celebrate moments that matter in life with loved ones through Parental and Birthday leave, and give back to your communities through Love-all-Serve-all (LASA) volunteering leave
- We have a confidential Grabber Assistance Programme to guide and uplift you and your loved ones through life's challenges.
- Balancing personal commitments and life's demands are made easier with our FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours