Up to P250,000 monthly pay on offer for Filipino engineers—foreign tech CEO

MANILA — A foreign technology company is betting big on Filipino talent, offering software developers monthly salaries of up to P250,000 as it transforms its Philippine office into its biggest global technology and product development hub.

Pleased.com founder and CEO Jonathan Sterling said the company wants Filipino engineers to do more than support overseas operations: they will help build the actual technology products that the company sells to clients worldwide.

The company is offering average monthly salaries of around P225,000 for mid-level developers and P250,000 for senior developers, as it competes for highly skilled Filipino professionals.

“We offer fantastic pay for the economy,” Sterling told ANC’s Startup with Ron Cruz.

Pleased.com has already hired around 35 employees at its new Philippine office, with another 10 to 15 candidates having accepted offers and serving their notice periods.

Sterling said the company had reached its target of 50 hires for 2026 ahead of schedule.

The office, located at Three/NEO in Bonifacio Global City, opened in September as part of the company’s push to expand its global technology operations from the Philippines.

Unlike traditional outsourcing operations focused on handling customer calls and back-office tasks, Pleased.com is building a technology and product development team in the country.

Most of its Philippine employees are software engineers, product managers, project managers and user experience and user interface designers. Only around 5 to 10 percent of its workforce is assigned to support and administrative functions, Sterling said.

The Philippine office is expected to become the company’s largest worldwide, with employees working on some of its most important product features.

Pleased.com previously focused on serving five large enterprise clients across Europe and Africa. It is now expanding its platform to reach a much wider customer base, particularly small and medium-sized businesses in the United States.

The self-described billionaire tech entrepreneur said the Philippines was an attractive location because of its large pool of underutilized talent.

“I think that the Philippines is currently underrated by international tech companies, and I think you will see more tech companies coming here over the next five, 10 years,” he said.

He believes artificial intelligence could make higher-value technology work more accessible to a broader pool of workers by helping them perform tasks that previously required more specialized capabilities.

Sterling said his decision to build a technology hub in the Philippines was also driven by the desire to give skilled Filipinos better-paying opportunities without requiring them to work overseas.

He pointed to the millions of Filipinos who leave the country for employment, saying many are highly skilled workers seeking better compensation.

His proposition: offer competitive international-level salaries locally so Filipino professionals can build global careers while staying close to their families.

The company is also offering benefits, performance bonuses and a five-day, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work arrangement.

Sterling said he wants employees to have autonomy over their work rather than operate under constant supervision, particularly as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into the workplace.

“We need people with high agency, the ability to dictate their own work and what they do, because they need to tell the AI what to do,” he said.

He also acknowledged that companies need employees who are genuinely curious and have retained the technical knowledge they learned in school, rather than simply earning degrees.

Beyond its Philippine hiring push, Pleased.com is accelerating its expansion in the United States.

Sterling said the company was already attracting around 100 new paying customer signups per week, just two weeks after starting its marketing campaign at the time of the interview.

He is targeting $10 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2027.

The company plans to pursue the United Kingdom, Australia and other European markets after establishing a larger US customer base.

Sterling said his long-term ambition is to make Pleased.com the world’s leading customer service platform.

For its Philippine operations, however, he has another measure of success: becoming the country’s best employer.

“We want to offer the best pay and we wanna be rated as the best company to work for in the entire country,” he said.

As Pleased.com expands, Sterling is also seeing artificial intelligence fundamentally change the customer service industry.

He estimates that AI now resolves approximately 75 percent of customer queries handled by the technology, up from 50 percent a year ago. He expects that figure to reach around 82% by the end of 2026.

But despite those gains, Sterling said he would not trust AI to independently handle highly complex or unfamiliar problems.

His warning: AI does not always recognize what it does not know, making human judgment and accountability essential.