Senior Technical Program Manager - Europe

Pencil

22h • Remote

About The Position

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 supports. 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 is a 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 enough technical depth to apply that rigour credibly in an AI-native, agent-driven environment. 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.

Requirements

• 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; comfortable in conversations about APIs, integration design, and platform trade-offs without being the engineer in the room.
• Engineering background a strong plus — many of the best program managers we've worked with came up through engineering before moving into the discipline.
• Structured thinker who writes clean documents: takes ambiguity, incomplete specs and competing stakeholder views and produces a clear framing with a recommended path.
• Communication at every altitude: a crisp update for leadership, a detailed dependency map for a tech lead, and the judgement to know which the situation calls for.
• Comfortable contributing to a young TPM discipline — helping shape templates, cadences and norms rather than just inheriting them.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a high-growth scale-up, and/or experience in a company building infrastructure while simultaneously using it on real customer workloads.

Responsibilities

• 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: enough ceremony to make decisions stick, never more.
• 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 (not own) the recurring sprint rhythm — planning, standups, retros and demos.
• Own the workback plan and dependency map for the programs in your portfolio — releases, integrations, and cross-team engineering work.
• Hold the full picture for your programs when everyone else is heads-down: what depends on what, who owns what, what is about to slip, and what needs to be escalated.
• Maintain the trackers and visibility surfaces that let engineers, product managers, and stakeholders see the same state of the world — keeping your project management tool (e.g. Linear) trustworthy enough that its views can be read without a verbal check: issues correctly labelled, estimated, assigned and in the right state.
• Own the standing views the organisation relies on — production bugs, in-flight work, blocked items — so status is a link, not a meeting.
• Surface technical and timeline risk early, challenge optimistic plans, and enforce readiness gates before commitments are made externally.
• Run end-to-end the programs that require multiple teams to move together — feature launches, integrations, and technical migrations.
• Scope, sequence and drive these programs to delivery: own the schedule, the trade-offs, and the comms back to stakeholders.
• Manage the seams between teams — where product hands off to engineering, and where engineering hands off to another workstream.
• Resolve cross-team blockers directly, going lead-to-lead to clear dependencies so coordination doesn't need to escalate upward.
• Apply the escalation framework: flag what is on track, what is at risk, and what needs a leadership call — and make sure the right call gets made.
• Own the first-responder rota for incidents and client interrupts in your area, absorbing and routing them before they land on a team mid-flow.
• Translate engineering reality for non-technical stakeholders and back again, so no one is surprised by scope or timeline.
• Keep a clean view of your program portfolio for your manager and the wider TPM function — a one-pager when it's a one-pager moment, a full dependency map when it isn't.
• Produce a trustworthy weekly written status for stakeholders and leadership, giving visibility across your programs without requiring attendance at every meeting.
• Support engineering and product leads on OKR reporting and tracking: keeping objectives and key results current, surfacing progress and drift each cycle, and turning them into a readable rollup so goal health is visible without a separate chase.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed