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.