Agent Architect

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.

The role

Agent Architects take a client's creative problem and make Scribble solve it reliably. You will lead discovery with brand and agency teams, define with them what a correct output looks like, and improve Scribble's performance against that definition until the work is ready to ship. You will then work out which parts of that solution should become standard behaviour in the core product for every customer.

This is a consulting role. You will shape agent behaviour through Pencil skills, evaluation criteria and a structured optimisation process, and you will build small helper projects, such as scripts, prototypes or data preparation tools, where they speed up the work. Where a client problem needs a change to the platform itself, you will make the case to the core product squads with evidence from your engagements.

You will report to the Head of Agent Architecture and be deployed into client teams as engagements require.

How we work

Our optimisation practice rests on a few principles. We start from the client's real briefs and agree what good looks like in terms precise enough to measure. We measure performance before changing anything, so every improvement can be shown against a baseline. We change one thing at a time and keep a record of what changed and why. We treat a failure as something to diagnose before fixing, because the cause may sit in the inputs, the agent's instructions or the way we are measuring. We call the work done only when results hold up on repeat. Much of the mechanical work is carried out by AI agents that you direct, so your time goes on judgement, diagnosis and the client relationship.

Key responsibilities

• Client discovery: Run structured discovery sessions with brand and agency stakeholders, and turn ambiguous briefs into a scoped problem with an agreed, measurable definition of done.

• Optimising for clients: Lead the optimisation of Scribble for your engagements from baseline to confirmed result, and give clients clear evidence of what improved and why.

• Measurement discipline: Design evaluation criteria, check that they catch known failures before relying on them, and keep them honest as the work reveals cases they missed.

• Extrapolating to the core: Generalise what works for one client so that it serves a whole category of work. Contribute examples, evaluation criteria and findings to the relevant core squad, and write clear, evidenced requests where a client problem can only be solved in the platform.

• Reusable practice: Build and maintain a library of skills, evaluation patterns and engagement playbooks that make each new engagement faster than the last.

• Communicating trade-offs: Explain results, failure modes and trade-offs between cost, speed and reliability to non-technical stakeholders in plain language.

Your background

• At least three years of hands-on work with large language models and generative image or video models, with a practical understanding of how agents fail and why.

• A background in solutions architecture, technical consulting or forward-deployed engineering, or a background in creative or design work where you have applied structured, critical thinking to technical problems. What matters is that you can take a vague problem, break it down and test your way to an answer.

• Enough technical understanding to work confidently alongside engineers. You can read JSON and API documentation, follow how data moves through a system, and direct AI agents to carry out multi-step work. Writing a simple script is a plus.

• An evaluation habit. You do not trust an output you have not measured, and you are comfortable designing scoring criteria and defending them.

• Creative literacy. You can sit with a Creative Director, understand what "make it feel more premium" means for a specific brand, and turn it into something measurable.

• Plain-language communication. You can explain an evaluation result or an agent failure to a CMO without jargon, and you enjoy doing it.

You will thrive here if

• You treat a failing output as a diagnosis problem to be solved.

• You are motivated by taking a 50-page brand book and proving, with evidence, that every output follows it.

• You would choose to sit with a confused client and untangle their problem over receiving a finished specification.

• You want each client engagement to leave the core product better for every customer.

KPIs and success measures

• Client outcomes: Engagements taken from a measured baseline to a confirmed, ship-ready result against the agreed definition of done.

• Speed of delivery: Time from agreed brief to confirmed result, falling as the practice matures.

• Contribution to the core: Client solutions generalised for wider use, and measurable improvement in the relevant core evaluation targets as a result of your contributions.

• Client adoption: Solutions in live use by the client, measured from brief to production use.

• Stakeholder trust: Clients and internal partners return to you to scope the next problem, with repeat engagement on strategic accounts.

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