Lead Technical Program Manager - Remote
Lead Technical Program Manager at Pencil, a Generative-AI SaaS platform for advertising. Independently owns cross-team engineering programs — platform releases, integrations, migrations — plus Tier 1 client engineering commitments, running workback plans, dependency maps and operating cadence. Remote within Canada, US or LATAM with London overlap.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- USA
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Project management
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager, ideally in AI/ML, platform infrastructure, or developer tooling
- Track record independently running complex programs with multi-team dependencies, hard external deadlines and company-level impact
- Experience owning engineering delivery for enterprise or Tier 1 clients: managing requests, setting realistic commitments, keeping clients informed
- Genuine technical fluency: comfortable reading system architecture and discussing APIs, integration design and platform trade-offs
- Structured thinker who writes clean documents and turns ambiguity into clear framing with a recommended path
- Communication at every altitude: leadership updates, dependency maps for tech leads, clear client-facing status
- Experience mentoring other program managers and creating templates, cadences and norms for the TPM discipline
- Track record of introducing new tools or ways of working that measurably reduced team overhead
Nice to have
- Engineering background a strong plus
- Bonus: experience in a high-growth scale-up, and/or building infrastructure while using it on real customer workloads
Full 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. 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.