VP of Product Design - EMEA - Remote

About us

Pencil uses generative AI to make advertising faster, cheaper and better performing, without replacing the creative people who make it. We are building the agentic operating system for marketing: Scribble, our agent, takes a brief and produces finished, brand-safe creative across image, video and structured formats for global brands and small businesses alike.

Why this role exists now

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.

Our designers sit inside product squads, and design has no single owner above them. Priorities are set squad by squad. This role closes that gap.

You will not start from a blank page. Pencil already has a design system, but it has not been fully reviewed or implemented across the product. Your first job is to own it: review it, close the gaps, and make it the way Pencil gets built.

The team also needs a leader. Someone who inspires people, builds a culture designers want to be part of, and brings creative ambition to a product that has mostly been built to work, not to delight.

What you will own

• One design function. Bring product design and UX into a single team with one quality bar. Designers report to design and work inside squads. Squads own priority and delivery; design owns craft and sign-off.

• Team culture. Inspire a team that has worked without a design leader. Build the critique, rituals and shared ambition that make designers proud of what they ship.

• Shipping, with magic. Get features out the door with product and engineering, on time and on-system. Then add what people remember: ideas, craft and moments of delight that go beyond the brief.

• Design speed. Make design faster, not a bottleneck. Set clear turnaround times for design work, use AI tools and the system to cut the time from brief to ready-to-build, and track how long design takes so squads can plan around it.

• The design system, and its adoption. Review the existing system, close its gaps, and implement it across the product. That means tokens in code, a component library engineering consumes, and adoption measured in shipped screens, not Figma files.

• Design for AI-built UI. Much of Pencil's UI is built with AI coding tools, and that will continue. Make the system the source those tools build from, with written guidelines that keep generated UI on-system.

• How people work with agents. Define how users brief, run, supervise, review and approve work done by agents. This is Pencil's core interaction model, and no one has solved it yet.

• Two users in the same screens. Enterprise buyers judge Pencil on governance, control and trust. Practitioners judge it on speed and creative range. The product has to serve both.

• 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. Work with Marketing Design so the product and the brand feel like the same company.

• Discovery and research. Bring design into discovery, before a squad commits to a solution. Work with product research so design decisions rest on customer evidence, and use post-launch reviews to check that what shipped did what we expected.

• Design engineering. Hire and lead design engineers who turn the system into code that engineering and AI coding tools build from.

• Accessibility. Build accessibility into the system so every feature meets the standard enterprise customers expect.

Your first year

First 90 days. 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. Agree design review and the contribution model with the CTO and product leads.

By month 6. The flows users touch most, such as running an agent, reviewing an output and managing assets, work the same way everywhere. Team structure, levels and rituals are in place.

By month 12. New features ship on-system by default, including the ones built with AI tools. Duplicated components are going down, not up. Customers describe Pencil as one product. Designers want to stay, and strong designers want to join.

Who you are

• 10+ years in product design, with 5+ years leading teams of designers, including other leads.

• You inspire people. You have built a design culture before, and designers have followed you from one team to the next.

• You bring creative ambition. You push past the functional brief to work that people notice and remember.

• You have taken an existing design system and made a product team actually use it, in a fast-moving B2B product. You can show what adoption looked like, not just the library.

• You know complex enterprise software: workflows, permissions, review and approval, dense data.

• You design with AI tools every day. You know what coding agents do to a design workflow, and you treat the system as the thing those tools build from.

• You speak engineering. Tokens, component APIs and front-end constraints are part of how you negotiate scope.

• You still have craft, and you use it. You can sit in a file and make a screen better.

• You lead through change. You earn the trust of a team that has worked without a design leader, and you bring existing leads with you.

It helps if you have designed AI or agent products, creative or marketing tools, or led teams across time zones.

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

Deep Dive 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 10x faster and cheaper to make, and 2x 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) by former Havas Global CEO David 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 the largest global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world's top 100. Clients include Banco Itaú, Danone, Google, Intuit, LVMH, Microsoft, Morgan-Stanley, Netflix, Reckitt, Renault-Nissan, PayPal, TikTok, Uber and Unilever.

In addition, the Group invests in cutting-edge technology companies relevant to and with potential in marketing and has been investing in the AI, AR and the metaverse space since 2015. The Group was the first external investor in Niantic (creators of Pokémon Go), alongside investments in AI Foundation (AI digital twins, personalized AI, and deep-fake detection 2018), Automat (AI chatbots, 2016), Elsy (AI media planning, 2016), Jivox (dynamic automated content, 2016), Crossing Minds (deep learning AI recommendation system, 2017), CreativeX (AI-driven content optimization, 2022), Zappar (AR, 2017), Provenance (blockchain, 2022) and GGP (the world's largest gaming fund).

The Group is one of the most prominent marketing industry voices on the prediction and movement to AI-driven marketing, including Generative AI. It was named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies 2021 by Fast Company, and by CB Insights as one of the World's Most Valuable Private Unicorns.

https://www.thebrandtechgroup.com