Lead Technical Program Manager - Remote

The posting, as Pencil wrote it

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. To do that at the pace we're moving, our product and engineering teams have to move together without losing coherence. That is the work this role leads.

The Lead Technical Program Manager independently owns a portfolio of complex, cross-team programs that have a direct impact on the company: platform releases, integrations, technical migrations, and the engineering commitments we make to our most important clients. It sets the workback plans, dependency maps and operating cadence for those programs, and increasingly defines the methods and processes other program managers use.

A core part of this role is supporting the engineering requests and requirements of our Tier 1 clients. You will be the program owner who turns what our largest enterprise customers need into scoped, sequenced engineering work and who makes sure what we commit to them is realistic, tracked, and delivered.

This is a senior craft role. It doesn't own a product area and doesn't manage engineers directly. What it owns is rigour (the structure that keeps a fast-moving engineering team aligned) combined with the technical depth and judgement to apply that rigour credibly in an AI-native, agent-driven environment, and to help others in the TPM function do the same.

This role reports into the Principal Technical Program Manager and partners closely with engineering leads, product managers and client-facing teams. Remote, based in Canada, the US or LATAM, with regular working-hours overlap with our London-based teams.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

TIER 1 CLIENT ENGINEERING REQUESTS

• Own the program for engineering requests and requirements coming from our Tier 1 clients: intake, scoping, prioritisation input, sequencing and delivery tracking.
• Partner with client-facing teams, product managers and engineering leads to translate client needs into clear, buildable requirements — and translate engineering reality back to the client side so commitments are realistic.
• Enforce readiness gates before any date or scope is committed to a Tier 1 client, and keep a single trusted view of every open client commitment, its owner and its status.
• Anticipate where client demands will collide with roadmap work and surface the trade-off early, with a recommended path, rather than letting it land as an escalation.

OPERATING RHYTHM & CADENCE

• Design and run the operating cadence for your area of the product and engineering organisation, and help shape the cadence used across the wider TPM function.
• Apply the minimum viable structure that keeps teams aligned without slowing them down: enough ceremony to make decisions stick, never more.
• Ensure decisions get made on time, with the right peop

[…]
lthough 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 Canada, the US or LATAM.
• Enhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacy.
• Access to our Pencil office in The Shard, London, when you're there.
• Flexible working hours.

ABOUT PENCIL

Pencil uses AI to make ads. Our mission is to make marketing effective and effortless. We want to become the default way ads get made — because AI ads are faster and cheaper to make, and better performing, than making them without AI.

We're called Pencil because we believe AI will be a tool for creative people, not a replacement — it may even be as fundamental a tool in the future as the pencil was in the past.

Pencil was founded in 2018 with a team from Google, Facebook and Uber with backing from Sequoia and Entrepreneur First. We were acquired by The Brandtech Group in 2023 to pursue a shared vision of bringing GenAI to the Fortune 500.

https://www.trypencil.com

ABOUT THE BRANDTECH GROUP

The Brandtech Group's mission is to be the best company in the world at helping leading global brands drive growth by connecting content, data and media using technology.

It was founded in June 2015 (as You & Mr Jones), with a simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology. It was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022.

Today it generates more than $1BN in revenue and is a leading global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with a majority of the world's top global advertisers. Clients include Banco Itau, Danone, Google, Intuit, LVMH, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Netflix, Reckitt, Renault-Nissan, PayPal, TikTok, Uber and Unilever.

https://www.thebrandtechgroup.com