Founder's Office Associate (BukuPay PH)

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.

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.

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.