Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.
About the role
We are seeking a Product Manager to support a large-scale digital transformation initiative. This role is highly delivery-focused and partners closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders to translate business needs into clear, actionable, development-ready requirements.
The ideal candidate excels at translating functional requirements into technical work items, including: backlog refinement, story writing, and cross-functional collaboration. This person bridges the gap between stakeholders, UX/design, and engineering, by ensuring work is well-defined, prioritized, and ready for implementation.
Embedded within a delivery team, you will work alongside Technical Leads, Delivery Leads, Product Manager, and Engineering teams to enable efficient delivery by reducing ambiguity, improving requirement quality, and maintaining a healthy pipeline of sprint-ready work.
Why This Role Matters
At Robots & Pencils, we design AI systems for a human world. Our name says it all. Robots and pencils means engineering paired with creativity, because every agent we ship has to work for real people in real workflows. That balance is baked into how we operate.
Every role here contributes directly to that mission. Here, you shape how AI systems integrate into enterprise operations, how teams move at real velocity, and how products create measurable impact for clients and the people they serve. We ship production-ready AI in 30 to 45 days. That pace demands people who take ownership, lead with craft, and care deeply about what they put their name on.
What you’ll do
Requirements Analysis
- Gather and clarify requirements
- Translate business and UX requirements into detailed technical requirements and user stories
- Identify gaps, dependencies, risks, and edge cases early in the delivery process
- Document workflows, business rules, process flows, and acceptance criteria
- Identify and document edge cases, exception handling, and state-based user scenarios to support high-quality implementation and QA validation
Backlog & Story Preparation
- Create and maintain detailed user stories and development-ready tickets in Jira
- Collaborate with Technical Leads and developers to ensure requirements are technically feasible and appropriately scoped
- Support backlog refinement sessions
- Ensure stories include sufficient detail for engineering and QA teams to execute effectively
- Assist in prioritization and sprint readiness activities
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Serve as a liaison between business stakeholders, design teams, and engineering
- Facilitate requirement clarification discussions and working sessions
- Support alignment across multiple delivery workstreams
- Help ensure delivered solutions align with business goals and user experience expectations
- Coordinate closely with technical teams and third-party vendors to document and manage integration requirements, dependencies, and sequencing across systems
- Track and coordinate cross-functional dependencies between product, UX, engineering, middleware, CMS, QA, and release management teams
- Partner with QA and business stakeholders during testing and UAT cycles to validate expected functionality and clarify intended behavior
Delivery Support
- Participate in sprint ceremonies including sprint planning, standups, demos, and retrospectives
- Support QA and UAT efforts by validating requirements and expected outcomes
- Help track open questions, dependencies, and decision points throughout delivery
- Contribute to continuous improvement of delivery and requirements processes
What You’ll Bring
- 4+ years of experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Business Analyst, or Agile BA
- Experience supporting software delivery teams, working directly with engineering and QA
- Strong experience writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional requirements
- Technical fluency with APIs, integrations, web/mobile applications, content management, or enterprise systems
- Ability to translate complex business needs into actionable development tasks
- Experience driving product and feature discovery
- Strong organizational, analytical, and communication skills
- Experience using Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, or similar tools
Helpful Extras and Unique Skills
- Experience supporting enterprise digital transformation initiatives
- Experience using AI-powered productivity tools to improve individual and project workflows
- Familiarity with hospitality, gaming, entertainment, loyalty, or customer experience platforms
- Experience working across multiple scrum teams or delivery streams
- Experience operating within enterprise-scale digital transformation programs involving multiple stakeholders, vendors, and parallel workstreams
Tech Stack
- Comfortable working within a modern enterprise digital ecosystem supporting native iOS and Android mobile applications, including familiarity with Swift and Kotlin development environments, mobile release processes, and app lifecycle management
- Strong experience working alongside engineering teams on API-driven architectures and enterprise integrations, including REST APIs, middleware platforms such as MuleSoft, authentication and identity management solutions like AWS Cognito and OAuth, and cloud-based infrastructure within AWS environments
- Experience supporting CMS and personalization platforms such as Contentful and Uniform
- Comfortable operating within Agile delivery environments using tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Figma, with a strong understanding of backlog management, sprint planning, technical requirements documentation, QA/UAT coordination, and cross-functional collaboration across product, design, engineering, QA, infrastructure, and release management teams
You’ll Do Well Here if You Are
- A doer. You see something broken and fix it. You'd rather move on clarity than wait for certainty.
- A fast learner who knows you don't know everything. The AI landscape changes weekly. You're senior enough to know better and curious enough to keep learning anyway.
- Direct in a way that makes the work better. You give honest feedback. You'd rather have the hard conversation than blow smoke.
- Obsessed with craft. You know genius is in the details. You ship exceptional, not perfect, and you don't put your name on work you wouldn't stand behind.
- Built for ownership. You honor commitments, admit mistakes fast, and back your teammates when a decision costs something. No handoffs, no finger-pointing.
- All in. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
- Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you.
- Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work.
