Pencil is Marketing's AI Operating System. 

We help enterprise brands aggregate AI models, enforce governance, and scale creative and media, safely. 

From insight to production to distribution, we unify the entire marketing workflow in one platform.

Most enterprise teams are stuck in pilot purgatory, testing AI tools that never scale, stitching together fragmented workflows, and watching budgets disappear into non-working spend. We built Pencil to end that.

We aggregate the best AI models from every provider –OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and more– into a single governed platform. This is what we call the Open Garden: you're never locked into one vendor's roadmap. You get the best model for every use case, today and tomorrow.

Our platform unifies the entire marketing workflow –from insight and creative concept through production, governance, and media distribution. Enterprise teams can design, orchestrate, and scale creative systems that hold up in production, across markets and languages, without sacrificing brand control.

Act 1 is efficiency. Reduce creative production costs by up to 50%, automate localization, and free up budget buried in agency fees and manual process. 

Act 2 is growth. Reinvest those savings into media performance –more variants, better ROAS, faster iteration. 

We believe AI should be a tool for the humans behind great marketing, not a replacement for them. The right tool changes what's possible.

SOC2 certified. No-Train policy. IP indemnification. Built for the security, scale, and governance that global brands actually need.

Trusted by Diageo, Unilever, Indeed, and L'Oréal. 
Gartner Cool Vendor 2025.

Founded in 2018. Part of The Brandtech Group since 2023.

Pencil

Marketing's AI Operating System. Part of The Brandtech Group.

At Pencil, we are driving innovation in advertising technology through our state-of-the-art SaaS product, which harnesses Generative AI to redefine content creation. Our mission is to make AI the default in advertising without replacing creative people. To achieve this, we need to make sure that our technology isn’t just in the hands of big brands - we need to try to help small businesses and creative individuals too.

We're looking for someone who loves building automations, agents and workflows, and wants to point that instinct at People Ops. You'll own the data and systems behind our People Ops stack (HiBob, Ashby, Remote), and use that ownership as the foundation for turning slow, manual, multi-tool processes into things that mostly run themselves. This is a role for someone who'd rather ship a working automation this week and improve it next week than spend a month planning the perfect system - someone who gets a genuine kick out of making the unglamorous stuff disappear. You’ll bring expertise, energy, and commercial thinking to help us elevate our People processes.

Key Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain automations, workflows, and AI agents across our People Ops tooling (HiBob, Ashby, Remote) - from a simple triggered workflow to a more sophisticated internal agent - turning multi-step manual processes into things that run themselves.Own the data layer everything else depends on: keep HiBob/Ashby/Remote data clean, resolve integration and schema issues between systems, and treat data integrity as the foundation of what you build, not an afterthought.Run new joiner onboarding end to end, but treat every manual step you touch twice as a candidate for automation, with the goal is to keep making the process faster and lighter-touch, not just execute it reliably.Administer employee lifecycle changes (promotions, transfers, terminations) across systems, and build the guardrails - validation rules, alerts, review steps etc, that catch data errors before they become a downstream mess in payroll or compliance.Process documentation: create and maintain SOPs, checklists, and playbooks for onboarding, offboarding, and systems admin current as processes evolve, so nothing lives only in your head.Partner with relevant stakeholders on anything touching UK employment or compliance judgement calls while you build fluency here. You own the system and the escalation path, and that ownership shifts to you over time.

Your Background

You can genuinely build: hands-on with automation/workflow tools (e.g. Zapier, Make, n8n, Retool or similar), and you've actually built or configured AI agents.You've worked with structured data and APIs enough to reason about schemas, integrations, and what breaks when two systems disagree with each other.You're comfortable being the systems administrator of SaaS platforms: owning permissions, workflows, and integrations, ideally across an HRIS/ATS/EOR stack (HiBob, Ashby, Remote) or a comparable set of business systems.You've worked in a high-growth environment, ideally remote and across multiple geographies, and you're comfortable working async across EMEA time zones.Any exposure to People Ops, HR systems, or UK employment practices is a genuine bonus, not arequirement - we're hiring for the builder instinct first, and will coach the domain knowledge.

You’ll Thrive Here If You…

You're an Owner. You don't wait to be told the onboarding flow needs fixing, you notice the friction and you just fix it.You're Fast. You'd rather ship a working automation this week and improve it next week than spend a month designing the perfect one.You like Simple. Your default build is the one with the fewest moving parts, not the most impressive one.You find Surprising in the unglamorous stuff. You get a kick out of turning "someone does this by hand every month" into something nobody thinks about again.You're Human, even with agents. You know the systems you're building sit behind someone's first week at a new job, or a colleague's benefits question — you design for that person, not just for the workflow diagram.

KPIs & Success Measures

Number and scope of manual People Ops processes automated, and time saved per cycleHiBob / Ashby / Remote data accuracy rateTime to resolve employee systems requestsReduction in error rate flowing into compliance-relevant fields

Benefits

25 days PTO plus public holidays, although we operate a Flexible Time Off schemeHealth insurance / private medical coverMonthly stipend towards wellness, fitness, and learning and developmentRemote - work from anywhere in your home countryEnhanced parental leave policies, whether you become a parent through birth, adoption or surrogacyAccess to our Pencil office in The Shard, London for UK employeesFlexible working hours

People Operations Specialist

What the job involves