[Hiring] Senior Technical Program Manager @Pencil

Role Description

At Pencil, we are building the operating system for AI-powered marketing — a SaaS platform that uses Generative AI to redefine how the world's biggest brands plan, produce and deploy advertising. Our mission is to make AI the default in marketing without replacing creative people.

The Senior Technical Program Manager is a hands-on program management role covering a defined portfolio of programs within Pencil's product and engineering organisation. It owns the workback plans, dependency maps, and operating cadence that keep specific initiatives — platform releases, integrations, and cross-team engineering efforts — on track and visible.

This role reports into the Principal Technical Program Manager and partners closely with engineering leads and product managers on the programs it owns. Remote, based in EMEA, with regular overlap with our London hub.

Key Responsibilities

• Operating Rhythm & Cadence
  • Help establish the operating cadence for your area of the product and engineering organisation.
  • Apply the minimum viable structure that keeps your teams aligned without slowing them down.
  • Ensure decisions get made on time, with the right people in the room, and with a written trail of what was decided and why.
  • Support the recurring sprint rhythm — planning, standups, retros and demos.
• Workback Planning & Dependency Management
  • Own the workback plan and dependency map for the programs in your portfolio.
  • Hold the full picture for your programs when everyone else is heads-down.
  • Maintain the trackers and visibility surfaces that let engineers, product managers, and stakeholders see the same state of the world.
  • Own the standing views the organisation relies on — production bugs, in-flight work, blocked items.
  • Surface technical and timeline risk early, challenge optimistic plans, and enforce readiness gates before commitments are made externally.
• Cross-Team Program Delivery
  • Run end-to-end the programs that require multiple teams to move together.
  • Scope, sequence and drive these programs to delivery.
  • Manage the seams between teams.
  • Resolve cross-team blockers directly.
• Risk, Escalation & Decision Support
  • Apply the escalation framework: flag what is on track, what is at risk, and what needs a leadership call.
  • Own the first-responder rota for incidents and client interrupts in your area.
  • Translate engineering reality for non-technical stakeholders and back again.
  • Keep a clean view of your program portfolio for your manager and the wider TPM function.
  • Produce a trustworthy weekly written status for stakeholders and leadership.
• Goal Tracking
  • Support engineering and product leads on OKR reporting and tracking.

Qualifications

• 6+ years experience as a Technical Program Manager, ideally in AI/ML, platform infrastructure, or developer tooling.
• Track record running complex programs with multi-team dependencies and hard external deadlines.
• Genuine technical fluency: comfortable reading a system architecture and understanding the implications.
• Structured thinker who writes clean documents.
• Communication at every altitude.
• Comfortable contributing to a young TPM discipline.
• Bonus: experience in a high-growth scale-up, and/or experience in a company building infrastructure while simultaneously using it on real customer workloads.

Requirements

• People management, performance, growth, and hiring — stay with engineering leadership and team leads.
• Technical decisions and architecture — owned by engineering leadership.
• Priority and product direction — owned by Product Managers.

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 within EMEA.
• Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy.
• Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London.
• Flexible working hours.