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Company

Build the rental market Cebu actually has

Car rental here runs on Facebook threads, Viber deposits and trust between people who already know each other. It works, and it does not scale, and it leaves both sides exposed. We are building the version with verification, real payments and evidence behind it — from Cebu, for Cebu first.

📍 Cebu City · hybrid👥 Small team, pre-launch
These roles are not open, and there is no application inbox behind this page.Sugbo Rentals has not launched and is not currently hiring. The roles, team details, benefits and process below are illustrative — they describe the shape of a team we expect to need, not vacancies you can apply for today. Please do not send applications against this page. When hiring opens, this page will say so and will carry a real way to apply.
What we are building

A two-sided marketplace with real money and real cars in it

Owners list vehicles. Renters book with three drive modes — self-drive, with a driver, or bringing their own. We handle verification, pricing, payments, deposits, handover documentation and disputes. Every one of those is a hard problem with a Philippine specific answer.

300Verified vehicles12-month target
800Completed bookings a month12-month target
3Drive modes, each with its own legal shapeThe core product problem
5Languages at launchEN · 한국어 · 日本語 · 简体中文 · Bisaya

The problems are specific, not generic

E-wallets cannot pre-authorise, so a deposit genuinely leaves someone’s GCash for two weeks. Foreign licences are valid for 90 days from arrival. A with-driver rental may need a franchise. None of this is solved by copying a US marketplace.

Local knowledge is a qualification

Knowing that the Hagnaya ferry queue on a Friday is three hours, or which Mactan hotels will let a handover happen in the lobby, changes the product. We would rather teach the codebase than the island.

We write things down before we build them

Our spec is a real document with a decision log, and decisions get revisited when they turn out to be wrong. If you like arguing an idea to a conclusion and then having the conclusion stick, you will like it here.

How we work

Five things that are true of the team

Written as claims you can hold us to in an interview, rather than values on a wall.

Small, and staying small a while
Pre-launch, with more scope than people. You will own a surface rather than a ticket queue, and you will occasionally do a job that is not yours
Hybrid, Cebu-based
Two or three days together in Cebu City. Supply and support work is genuinely local — you cannot verify an OR/CR or meet a fleet operator from a laptop in another country
Money is treated carefully
Deposits and payouts are other people's money. We would rather ship a week later than round a centavo wrongly, and the database enforces the invariants rather than trusting the code
Ops and engineering sit together
The person who mediates disputes tells the person building the evidence viewer what is missing. This is not a ticket relay
Open questions stay open
Insurance, our operator status, the foreign-licence rules — several big things are unresolved and we say so internally and on our own public pages rather than pretending otherwise
The team we are building

Where we will need people

All roles are Cebu City hybrid unless noted. Illustrative — none of these is currently open.

Senior Full-Stack Engineer

Own the booking and checkout path end to end — availability, pricing, the payment lifecycle, and the database constraints that make double-booking impossible rather than unlikely. TypeScript, Next.js, Postgres.

EngineeringFull-timeCebu City · hybrid

Payments Engineer

Cards, GCash and Maya, on one model. Authorise, capture, void, partial capture, idempotent webhooks that arrive twice and out of order, and reconciliation in exact minor units. If you have opinions about float and money, we share them.

EngineeringFull-timeCebu City · hybrid

Product Designer

Design for a foreign tourist on airport wifi and a fleet operator on a five-year-old Android, in five languages. The hardest screens are the handover checklist and the price breakdown, and both are used standing next to a car.

DesignFull-timeCebu City · hybrid

Trust & Safety Lead

Build the verification, moderation and dispute function from scratch: the evidence standard, the enforcement ladder, the appeal path, and the fraud signals worth acting on. Write the rules, then live with them.

OperationsFull-timeCebu City · hybrid

Verification & Ops Specialist

The queue behind every booking: IDs, licences, OR/CR documents, insurance certificates, and the judgement calls that a checklist does not cover. Reading LTO paperwork quickly is the core skill.

OperationsFull-timeCebu City · on-site

Host Growth Manager

Supply is the whole game before launch. Meet the fleet operators and casual owners who already rent informally around Metro Cebu and Mactan, and get their vehicles listed, photographed and verified.

GrowthFull-timeCebu · field

Support Specialist — Bisaya / English

Live-trip support: handovers going sideways, delayed flights, a deposit someone is worried about. Calm, fast, and able to explain a refund clock to someone standing in an arrivals hall. Korean or Japanese is a real plus.

SupportFull-time · shiftCebu City · hybrid
Interested anyway?

There is nothing to apply to yet, and we would rather say that than collect applications against roles that do not exist. When hiring opens it will be announced here.

If you have worked in Philippine rental, logistics, payments or tourism and want to be told when that happens, say so through the help centre — that reaches a person, and it is the only route on this page that goes anywhere.

Hiring process

Four steps, about two weeks

How it will run when it runs. You will know where you stand at each step, including when the answer is no.

  1. Within 5 daysApplication review
    A person reads it. Everyone gets an answer, including the people we are not moving forward with.
  2. 45 minutesConversation about the work
    What you have built or run, what went wrong, and what you would want to own here. Not a quiz.
  3. 90 minutesA real problem from our backlog
    Engineers work through a live design problem with us — no take-home, no algorithm puzzles. Ops and growth roles do a scenario from the actual queue.
  4. Same weekMeet the team, then an offer
    Coffee in Cebu City with the people you would work with, then a decision within a few days. References after an offer, never before.
Adjustments

Tell us what you need to interview well — a different format, more time, a remote session, an interpreter. Asking has no bearing on the outcome.

The offer

What would come with the job

Salary
Banded by role and reviewed annually. The band is stated in the first conversation, not negotiated out of you at the end
Equity
For every full-time role, with the terms explained in plain language before you sign
Statutory, properly
SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG, plus HMO from day one — for you, with dependants added after regularisation
Leave
20 days, and Philippine regular and special non-working holidays. Support roles work a rota with the same total
Equipment
A laptop you choose, and a phone if the role needs one in the field
Learning
An annual budget, and time inside working hours to use it
Getting around
Transport and parking covered for field and handover work. You will be at the airport more than you expect
Equal opportunity, stated plainly

We hire on what you can do. No screening on age, sex, gender identity, civil status, religion, disability, health status or where in the country you are from — and we follow Philippine labour and anti-discrimination law as a floor rather than a ceiling.

The benefits above describe intended practice for a company that has not started hiring. They are not a contractual offer, and they will be restated properly when they attach to a real role.