# Data mesh at Grab part I: Building trust through certification

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Chun Rong Phang · Aug 19, 2025

## Summary

Rapid business growth across multiple verticals led Grab's centralized data engineering model to become an unscalable bottleneck, resulting in duplicate pipelines, ambiguous ownership, and broken downstream dependencies. To resolve these issues, the organization initiated a data mesh journey called Signals Marketplace that decentralizes data management and treats data as a product. A central data certification system establishes formal data contracts covering schemas, SLAs, freshness, and retention, while assigning clear Business Data Owners and Technical Data Owners. Breaches in contract guarantees automatically generate Data Production Incident tickets to enforce accountability and root-cause fixes. Consequently, 75% of internal queries now target certified assets, redundant tables saw a 400% year-over-year deprecation increase, and the total number of top-used datasets dropped by over 58%.

## Takeaways

- Grab established formal data contracts that define schemas, SLA guarantees, change notice periods, and communication channels between producers and consumers.
- Automated Data Production Incidents (DPIs) trigger and assign tickets to Technical Data Owners whenever tests for availability, consistency, freshness, or completeness fail.
- Adopting the percentage of queries targeting certified assets as a north star metric helped drive 75% of all queries to certified products and reduced top 80% used datasets by over 58%.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Data Pipelines](https://yomu.fyi/topic/data-pipelines), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/signals-market-place)