Latest Engineering Articles

This post introduces Coban, Grab's platform for real-time Kafka stream data quality monitoring using user-defined data contracts with syntactic and semantic test rules.

Engineering

Kafka

Performance

AlphaFold: Five years of impact

This article reflects on five years of AlphaFold's impact since solving the protein structure prediction problem in 2020, recognized with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Spotify

31 min read

AI•2025-11-24

Background Coding Agents: Context Engineering (Honk, Part 2)

Spotify shares lessons from building a background coding agent ("Honk") that automates large-scale code migrations by generating mergeable pull requests across thousands of repositories.

SpellVault’s evolution: Beyond LLM apps, towards the agentic future

This article describes how Grab's internal AI platform SpellVault evolved from a no-code LLM app builder into an agentic AI platform capable of reasoning and acting dynamically.

Android VPAT journey

Slack shares lessons from their 2024 Android VPAT accessibility audit, detailing how they resolved key issues found after a major UI change.

Machine Learning•2025-11-18

LyftLearn Evolution: Rethinking ML Platform Architecture

This post describes how Lyft evolved LyftLearn, their end-to-end ML platform, from a fully Kubernetes-based system to a hybrid architecture combining AWS SageMaker and Kubernetes.

distributed-systems

artificial-intelligence

How Dash uses context engineering for smarter AI

Dropbox Dash evolved from a traditional RAG-based enterprise search into an agentic AI system, requiring a new discipline called context engineering to manage what information models receive.

Go’s Sweet 16

Go celebrates its 16th open source anniversary with major releases in Go 1.24 and 1.25, covering language improvements, security, and AI tooling.

Stripe

41 min read

Backend•2025-11-11

Create new monetization opportunities with Stripe Billing’s recent upgrades

Stripe Billing has released a series of upgrades expanding multiprocessor support, flexible billing models, and AI-specific pricing tools.

Slack

11 min read

DevOps•2025-11-06

Build better software to build software better

This post explains how the Slack/Quip build team reduced 60-minute build times by applying software engineering principles (caching and parallelization) to their Bazel-based build pipeline.

Grab's Mac Cloud Exit supercharges macOS CI/CD

Grab migrated its macOS CI/CD infrastructure from a US cloud vendor to a self-owned colocation cluster in Malaysia, achieving major cost and performance gains.

Machine Learning•2025-11-04

How we built a custom vision LLM to improve document processing at Grab

Grab built a custom ~1B Vision LLM to improve eKYC document processing for Southeast Asian languages and documents.