Senior Product Designer

Note: Partly is headquartered in Austin, TX with offices in London, UK, Christchurch, NZ and Auckland, NZ. Wherever you're based, we'll connect you with your nearest office for onboarding, and fly you to join the full team for our quarterly "Season Openers" (we cover travel and accommodation). If you're relocating to join us, we can also assist with relocation costs.

🚀 Our story

Partly is connecting the world's parts, and we're doing that by building the AI infrastructure layer for the global repair industry, starting with the $2tn automotive market. Our frontier model, Interpreter, is the world's first AI purpose-built to understand vehicle damage and the parts needed to fix it. Thousands of businesses across the global repair supply chain already rely on it.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we've tripled in size in the last 18 months and have recently raised a $50m Series B led by DST Global (Anthropic, Airbnb, Meta, TikTok, Spotify) and including Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), WNDR, Activant Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Square Peg, Airtree, and Ecliptic Venture Capital. We're headquartered in Austin, with offices in New Zealand and London.

We're continuing to build a world-class team ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built, and our values are lived throughout every experience.

Want to learn more about the problems we're solving and the culture we're building at Partly? Hear directly from our team here: https://shorturl.at/iAFUX

🖍️ This role

You will own the experience for a complex product area. Your PM owns the product strategy and outcomes. You own how it feels to use. You'll go deep on one of our hardest challenges, whether that's parts cataloguing, search and discovery, buyer workflows, or marketplace experiences, and be the person who ensures the humans using it can do their jobs better, faster, and with less friction.

Concretely, this means you'll be doing things like:

• Defining how a parts seller navigates and manages a catalogue of 500,000+ SKUs across multiple vehicle fitment hierarchies. Not just designing a table, but understanding how these people actually work and deciding what the right experience model is

• Designing search and discovery experiences where a wrong match has real consequences. A brake pad that doesn't fit a vehicle isn't a bad recommendation, it's a safety issue. You need to deeply understand what confidence and clarity mean to the people using this

• Bringing a strong point of view on what the experience should be to your PM and engineering lead. They own the product strategy. You own the user experience. The best outcomes happen when those perspectives push each other

• Producing prototypes and high-fidelity designs that hold up in production, not just in Figma. You care about edge cases, states, and the messy reality of real data because real people will encounter all of it

• Making hard trade-offs between speed, quality, and technical feasibility. You'll need to understand the codebase and data model well enough to know what's possible, and advocate for the experience that matters most within those constraints

• Contributing to our design system and shared patterns so your best experience decisions scale beyond your own product area

• Giving direct, specific feedback in critique that makes other designers, PM’s, and engineers work better

You'll work closely with your PM and engineering counterparts in a fast-moving environment where shipping fast matters, perfect is the enemy of good, and the bar for what "good" means is exceptionally high.

💻 What you’ll do

You've owned the user experience for a complex product area and shipped outcomes, not just features. We're looking for designers who can point to a product where they owned how people experienced it for 12+ months. Work where they understood the users deeply, redefined what the experience should be, and delivered measurable results. If your best stories start with "I was given a brief" rather than "I saw how people were struggling and changed the approach," this probably isn't the right fit.

You have strong product and business judgment. You reason from first principles. You can explain why you chose one approach over another, what you traded off, and what you'd do differently in hindsight. You don't optimise for visual polish at the expense of user outcomes.

You're a trusted partner to your PM and engineers. They want you in the room because you make the work better, not because process requires it. You influence decisions through clarity and evidence, not authority.

Your craft is excellent and you know the difference between polish and quality. Your interaction design is precise. Your systems thinking is strong. You obsess over how real people will experience what you build, designing for scale, edge cases, and the messy reality of production. Not just the happy path in a Figma prototype.

You move fast and operate with high autonomy. You don't wait for permission, perfect data, or complete alignment. You make calls, ship, learn, and iterate. You're comfortable being wrong quickly rather than right slowly.

You raise the bar for experience quality through your own work and your feedback. You set a craft standard others learn from. You give constructive, specific critique. You contribute to design systems and shared patterns that make the team's experiences more consistent, more intuitive, and more human.

Your skills and experience

• Senior product design experience, typically 6+ years designing complex software products

• A portfolio demonstrating strong design fundamentals, polished UI craft, and clear product thinking

• Deep fluency in interaction design, UX design, and prototyping to explore, test, and communicate ideas

• A genuine curiosity about the people who use what you build. You seek out customer insight through research, observation, and direct conversation

• Strong systems thinking and the ability to design solutions that scale beyond a single feature

• Clear communication skills, written, verbal, and visual, with the ability to explain design rationale and influence your immediate partners

• Proficiency with modern design tools (e.g. Figma) and prototyping workflows

• Thoughtful adoption of modern design practices, including AI-assisted design workflows, where they meaningfully improve speed, quality, or leverage

What makes this role hard (and interesting)

• The domain is genuinely complex: vehicle fitment, parts taxonomy, and catalogue management are not intuitive problem spaces. You'll need to learn deeply and quickly.

• Our customers are professionals, not casual consumers. They have high expectations, low tolerance for friction, and workflows shaped by decades of industry convention.

• We're building global infrastructure so our solutions need to work across different markets, languages, and parts standards.

• Speed is a core value, not a buzzword. Most decisions are reversible, and a good solution shipped this week beats a perfect one shipped next month.

• The team is small and the expectations are high. You'll have enormous ownership and very little cover.

What's valuable but not required

• Experience designing workflow-heavy, data-dense, or technically complex B2B products

• Experience collaborating closely with research or using quantitative data to validate design decisions

• Experience contributing to or evolving design systems

• Experience in marketplace, catalogue, e-commerce, or supply chain domains

• Experience with SaaS platforms, enterprise software, or developer tools

• Experience working in high-growth startup environments

Please note: if you don't have all the skills or experience listed above but believe you could be outstanding in this role, please still consider applying. Many people count themselves out. We'd love the chance to learn more about you and why you're exceptional.

🎡 Benefits

• Healthy, Catered Lunches - Enjoy fresh, healthy lunches every workday in our Auckland, Christchurch, London, and Austin offices. With no meal prep needed, you can eat, connect, and refuel with your team. (And yes, snacks and drinks are always on hand.)

• Healthy Body, Healthy Mind - We care about performing at our peak. Every team member gets a $1,500 annual wellness allowance (or local equivalent) on a Partly-branded card. Use it on things such as gym memberships, rock climbing, physical therapy, massage, doctor visits, prescriptions—anything that you or your family need!

• Family Comes First - Primary caregivers receive 3 months of fully paid parental leave, plus a flexible return-to-work plan (four days a week at full pay for your first three months back).

• Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or coworking space, choose from a paid 24/7 parking spot or a commuting allowance. One less thing to think about!

• Workspaces That Inspire - Our brand-new, architecturally designed offices are built for collaboration and creativity, with great coffee, social spaces, and some of the best cafes just a few steps away.

• Office-First with Flexibility - In cities where we have an office (Christchurch, Auckland, London, and Austin), we default to working from the office every day. This lets us move faster, make better decisions, and build strong relationships. We also operate with a high-trust environment, so you can manage your time around your life and flex your schedule to do your best work.

• We Celebrate Together - From weekly happy hours and monthly lunches to quarterly season openers and an annual global offsite, we make time to connect, celebrate, and have fun as one team.