Head of Software Engineering

Tenext.ai; Philippines; Hybrid; PHP 2,790,000 - 3,906,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity up to 1.5%

HMO for dependents

15 days vacation leave + 15 days sick

AI coding tools

Choice of machine

Job summary

Tenext.ai, headquartered in Makati and operating as a hybrid full-time engineering leader, seeks a Head of Software Engineering to own architecture, delivery, quality, and team-building.

You will guide the platform toward becoming the premier AI customer experience provider in Southeast Asia, making critical technical calls and building a scalable engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, including owning delivery for a team or a product.
• Deep backend or full-stack experience, with production systems you can discuss in detail.
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure and container orchestration, enough to redesign it rather than only operate it.
• You have carried a production SLA for an external customer, including the 3am version.
• You have mentored engineers earlier in their careers, and enjoyed it.
• You are comfortable in a technical conversation with an enterprise client’s IT or security team.

Responsibilities

• Architecture: You choose how the platform is built and what we build next, including what we build ourselves and what we buy.
• Delivery: Scope, estimate and sequence the work, then ship it. You are accountable for what lands, not for the plan.
• Production: We run under enterprise SLAs. Uptime and latency are commitments, not aspirations, and they become yours.
• The model layer: Selecting and evaluating the speech and language models we depend on, and building the evaluation harness.
• The team: You raise the level of the engineers here through code review and pairing, and you will hire three to five more over the next twelve months.
• The product: Real influence on what we build, not a spec handed to you. You will also be in the room with enterprise customers, which is the fastest feedback loop we have.

Skills

7+ years of software engineering

Backend or full-stack

Cloud infrastructure

Production SLA experience

Mentoring engineers

Enterprise client discussions

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Head of Software Engineering

Rockwell Makati, hybrid·Full-time·Reporting to the CEO

The Philippines is the world’s call center capital, and that industry is about to be rebuilt as software. In the US, Sierra and Decagon are doing it at $15 billion and $4.5 billion valuations. Neither of them can hold a conversation in Taglish.

We’re building it here, Filipino-owned, where the language and the domain knowledge already are. Every agent is AI. No floor, no headsets, no hold music. A bank’s customer gets answered on the first ring, at 2am, on a holiday.

• Team: A small engineering team that you will grow
• Location: Rockwell Makati, hybrid, three days in office
• Employment: Full-time employee
• Compensation: PHP 250,000-350,000 per month, plus equity of up to 1.5%
• Growth path: This role can grow into CTO as the team does

The role

You will own software engineering at Tenext. Not the roadmap slide, the actual thing: architecture, delivery, quality, and the team building it.

Our ambition is to be the default AI customer experience platform in Southeast Asia. We get there by making better technical calls than far better funded competitors, and those calls would be yours.

Our CEO is not an engineer. He owns commercial priorities, customer commitments and what we sell. You own how we build it: architecture, tooling, standards, and who joins the team. Where the two collide we argue it out, and you will not be overruled on technical grounds.

Expect to spend about half your week writing code. This is a builder’s job that happens to come with a title. If you have not shipped in the last year, you will not enjoy it.

Why this is hard

Code-switching mid-sentence breaks general-purpose models. We handle it inside a latency budget of under 1.5 seconds end to end, over live telephony, for regulated clients who each need their own isolated environment. Those constraints fight each other, and there is no textbook for it.

Responsibilities

• Architecture. You choose how the platform is built and what we build next, including what we build ourselves and what we buy.
• Delivery. Scope, estimate and sequence the work, then ship it. You are accountable for what lands, not for the plan.
• Production. We run under enterprise SLAs. Uptime and latency are commitments, not aspirations, and they become yours.
• The model layer. Selecting and evaluating the speech and language models we depend on, and building the evaluation harness that tells us whether a change actually made things better.
• The team. You raise the level of the engineers here through code review and pairing, and you will hire three to five more over the next twelve months. You choose every one of them.
• The product. Real influence on what we build, not a spec handed to you. You will also be in the room with enterprise customers, which is the fastest feedback loop we have.

Your first 90 days

Your first project is making enterprise client onboarding repeatable, so we can bring on the next five as quickly as the first. By day 90 we expect you to have shipped it, read every service in production, and told us what you would change.

How we work

• Three days a week together in Rockwell Makati, because pairing with engineers early in their careers does not work over Slack. The other two days are yours.
• There is no formal on-call rotation yet. Designing one is part of this job, and you will not be the only person carrying it.
• You will not be writing status decks or maintaining a board for its own sake.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, including owning delivery for a team or a product
• Deep backend or full-stack experience, with production systems you can discuss in detail
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure and container orchestration, enough to redesign it rather than only operate it
• You have carried a production SLA for an external customer, including the 3am version
• You have mentored engineers earlier in their careers, and enjoyed it
• You are comfortable in a technical conversation with an enterprise client’s IT or security team

Nice to have

Real-time systems, conversational AI, or LLM products in production. SaaS or platform products. Enterprise security and compliance work.

Benefits

• Equity of up to 1.5%, four-year vest, one-year cliff
• HMO from day one, with two dependents covered
• 15 days vacation leave, 15 days sick leave
• Your choice of machine, and we pay for the AI coding tools you want to use

This is not for you if

You want an established engineering organization, a manager above you, or a role where you stop writing code. None of those exist here yet. Building them is the job.

Process

Three weeks from first call to decision. A 45-minute call with our CEO, a technical conversation about work you have already done, a working session with the team, then an answer. No take-home assignment. We will be straight about our funding position on the first call, and we reply to every applicant within a week.

• You do not need to meet every requirement to apply. Tenext is an equal opportunity employer and hires on evidence of capability.