pencil - Lead Technical Program Manager - Remote

• 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 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 — and coordinate larger retrospectives across teams when a program or incident calls for one. • WORKBACK PLANNING & DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT • Own the workback plans and dependency maps for the programs in your portfolio — releases, integrations, client commitments 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. • Keep 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, client commitments — so status is a link, not a meeting. • Actively reduce complexity: automate status collection, reporting and tracker hygiene wherever possible, and lead adoption of new tools and AI-native workflows that make the function faster. • Surface technical and timeline risk early, challenge optimistic plans, and enforce readiness gates before commitments are made externally. • CROSS-TEAM PROGRAM DELIVERY • Independently run the programs that require multiple teams to move together — feature launches, client integrations and technical migrations — including those with company-level impact. • Determine the methods and approach for new or ambiguous programs: scope, sequence and drive them to delivery, owning the schedule, the trade-offs and the comms back to stakeholders. • Manage the seams between teams — where product hands off to engineering, engineering hands off to another workstream, and client-facing teams hand off to delivery. • Resolve cross-team blockers directly, going lead-to-lead to clear dependencies so coordination doesn't need to escalate upward. • Put out fires before they cause harm: spot the program that is drifting and act on it independently. • RISK, ESCALATION & DECISION SUPPORT • Apply and refine 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. • Provide expert advice on complex delivery decisions that affect other teams or the company at large. • Translate engineering reality for non-technical stakeholders and back again, so no one is surprised by scope or timeline. • Produce a trustworthy weekly written status for stakeholders and leadership — a one-pager when it's a one-pager moment, a full dependency map when it isn't. • 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. • GROWING THE TPM FUNCTION • Create, not just improve, the templates, cadences and trackers used across the TPM function, and make sure they outlast you. • Mentor and actively support more junior program managers, and coordinate their activities on shared programs where needed. • Act as an ambassador for our values in how programs are run and in TPM hiring, including taking part in interview loops. • Stay current with how leading AI-native engineering organisations run delivery, and bring the best ideas back to Pencil. • EXPLICITLY NOT OWNED • People management, performance, growth, and hiring decisions — stay with engineering leadership and team leads. • Technical decisions and architecture — owned by engineering leadership. • Priority and product direction — owned by Product Managers. • The commercial client relationship — owned by client-facing teams; this role owns the engineering delivery behind it.