Founder's Office Associate (BukuPay PH) in Makati City at bukuwarung

About BukuWarung

BukuWarung is building the operating system for small merchants across South-East Asia: software, payments, and financial services in one platform. We serve MSMEs in Indonesia and the Philippines, we are around 300 people, profitable, and scaling towards 750+ over the next 24 months, with an IPO target of 2030 under a principle of Profitable Growth. We are headquartered in Singapore with operations primarily in Jakarta. The Philippines is our second market and the Founder's Office works across all of it.

Role Overview

The Founder's Office is where BukuWarung's most important and least well-defined problems land. This is that seat for the Philippines.

The Philippines is early. The QR soundbox is out with merchants, the team on the ground is lean, and the next set of products is queued behind it. What we do not have is one person in-country who can find out what Filipino merchants actually need, turn that into something a product team can build, and clear the legal path to get it launched.

You are not here to run a research function or wait for a brief. You go and find out, form a view, write it down, and then get the thing shipped. Founder's Office scope changes as the business changes: the four workstreams below are where you start, not the limit of what you will own.

What You Will Own

Scope 1: Merchant Research and Ground Truth

You will be the person in this company who knows what Filipino merchants actually do with their money, because you sat in their shop and watched. Roughly 8 to 10 merchant conversations a week: sari-sari stores, wet markets, and the barangays where our field team sells. You run the conversation yourself, in Filipino. No agency, no survey panel. Every week produces something written that other people use, and a problem list that gets shorter and sharper as you validate it.

Scope 2: New Product Development

Research that never changes a product decision is a hobby. You will turn what you learn into requirements a team can build from, working with our in-country product manager and the product group in Jakarta. First up is the mini ATM launch, which turns a merchant's shop into a cash withdrawal point for the neighbourhood around it. You hold launch readiness end to end: what is in, what gets cut, what merchants are told, what the field team needs to sell it, and what happens in week one when it breaks.

Scope 3: Research, Analysis, and Whatever Else Lands

This is the part we cannot write down in advance, and it is most of what a Founder's Office does. Some of it is analysis: sizing an opportunity, working out why a number moved, building the model that settles an argument. Some of it is documentation: the SOP for a process that currently lives in one person's head, or the memo that gets a decision made instead of deferred. Some of it is a problem the business hands you because it needs an owner and you are the person standing there. You will run several of these at once, hold your own progress without being chased, and deliver a working answer rather than a deck.

Scope 4: The Legal and Regulatory Path to Launch

Nothing launches in Philippine financial services without clearing regulation, and this is usually where launches stall. You will own that path: what the BSP framework requires for the product in question, which licences, registrations or partner arrangements are needed, what our data privacy obligations are, and what our counsel needs from us to move. You brief and drive external counsel rather than wait on them. You do not need to be a lawyer. You do need to read the actual rule, not a summary of it.

A note on scope. This is a generalist job. Some weeks are merchant interviews, some are writing a spec, some are chasing a registration, some are a problem none of us has thought of yet. If you want a single lane, this is the wrong role.

Who You Are

You are a genuine jack of all trades. Handed a half-formed problem, you do not wait for more context: you go and find it, form a view, write it down, and move. You are as comfortable in a sari-sari store at 7am as you are in a document at 11pm, and you would rather be useful across five problems than expert in one.

Must-have

• You write, and it is good. Clear, concise, no filler. Writing is how decisions get made at BukuWarung: your memo is often the product. This is the single most important skill in this role.

• You are good with numbers. You size things, crunch them, and build the simple model that settles the argument. Spreadsheet fluency assumed. There is no analyst here to hand it to.

• Primary research with real users, done by you, in Filipino. You have sat in front of merchants or customers, run the conversation yourself, and turned what you heard into a decision someone acted on. Desk research and dashboards do not count. Fluent Filipino and English are both required: merchant research does not happen in English. You will be in the field weekly, not quarterly.

• Product chops. You have written requirements or specs that engineers built from, and stayed with it through launch and the mess after launch.

• You work with AI, not around it. You use AI tools to do the actual work: analysis, drafting, building a small internal tool, replacing something manual. Come ready to show us one thing you built with them.

• Comfort with the legal and regulatory side of a product. You have worked alongside counsel or a regulator, read the rule yourself, and turned it into a plan with dates.

• 3+ years in a fast-moving environment where you owned more than your title suggested: fintech, a marketplace, a startup, or a founder's office.

Strong preference

• Prior founder's office, chief of staff, or a high-accountability generalist seat at a tech company.

• Payments or fintech, particularly anything involving devices, agent networks, or cash-in and cash-out.

• You have launched something in a market or segment that was new for your company, and can tell us what you got wrong.

• Regulatory work with the BSP, a partner bank, or an EMI licence holder.

Personal attributes

• Low ego, high standards. You do not need credit to stay motivated, but you do need the work to matter.

• Direct. You say what you think, including to people more senior than you.

• Resourceful under constraint. Asked what you would do with two people and six months, you reframe rather than ask for budget.

• Comfortable with ambiguity. Scope will shift and priorities will change, and that energises you rather than frustrating you.