[Hiring] VP of Product Design @Pencil

Role Description

Pencil has grown fast, one feature at a time. Much of the UI has been designed and built with AI tools. The product works, but it does not yet feel like one product: components are duplicated, the same task works differently in different places, and there is no shared foundation.

Your first job is to own the design system: review it, close the gaps, and make it the way Pencil gets built.

• One design function: Bring product design and UX into a single team with one quality bar.
• Team culture: Inspire a team that has worked without a design leader.
• Shipping, with magic: Get features out the door with product and engineering, on time and on-system.
• Design speed: Make design faster, not a bottleneck.
• The design system, and its adoption: Review the existing system, close its gaps, and implement it across the product.
• Design for AI-built UI: Make the system the source those tools build from.
• How people work with agents: Define how users brief, run, supervise, review and approve work done by agents.
• Two users in the same screens: The product has to serve both enterprise buyers and practitioners.
• How design works with product and engineering: Design review, who approves new patterns, and the rituals the three disciplines share.
• The team: Structure, levels, career paths and hiring.
• Discovery and research: Bring design into discovery, before a squad commits to a solution.
• Design engineering: Hire and lead design engineers who turn the system into code.
• Accessibility: Build accessibility into the system so every feature meets the standard enterprise customers expect.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in product design, with 5+ years leading teams of designers.
• You inspire people and have built a design culture before.
• You bring creative ambition and push past the functional brief.
• You have taken an existing design system and made a product team actually use it.
• You know complex enterprise software: workflows, permissions, review and approval, dense data.
• You design with AI tools every day.
• You speak engineering: Tokens, component APIs and front-end constraints are part of how you negotiate scope.
• You still have craft and can make a screen better.
• You lead through change and earn the trust of a team.
• It helps if you have designed AI or agent products, creative or marketing tools, or led teams across time zones.

Requirements

• Meet every designer, and learn the product, the squads and the customers.
• Review the existing design system and decide what to keep, fix and implement first.
• Ship one shared pattern across two features.
• By month 6, ensure the flows users touch most work the same way everywhere.
• By month 12, new features ship on-system by default.

Benefits

• 25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off scheme.
• Health insurance / private medical cover.
• Monthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and development.
• Remote: work from anywhere in your home country.
• Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy.
• Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for UK employees.
• Flexible working hours.