Product Engineer

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

💻 What will you do

• Build, not just specify. Prototype new product iterations yourself using AI-assisted and LLM-assisted tooling—fast, disposable, real. Treat the prototype as the hypothesis and put it in front of real customers before writing the spec. Ship production code, instrument it, and watch how it actually gets used.

• Stay close to customers. Spend time where the work happens. Understand what estimators, parts managers, and others actually do, where they lose time, and what "better" would feel like. This is a core weekly activity, not an occasional input.

• Reconcile signal. Combine what you see with what the data says, and reconcile the two when they disagree. Turn that understanding straight into what you build next.

• Own the outcome. Steer by your surface's metrics; adoption and value delivered are yours. Make the call on priority and explain the reasoning, especially when the answer is no. When something is broken, own it, diagnose it precisely, and fix it.

• Make the trade-off. Weigh product impact against engineering effort in the same breath, and find the cheaper path to the same outcome.

• Build the agentic experience. Move your surface from manual operation toward supervised delegation: capture intent, decide where the human stays in the loop, and earn trust step by step so users never lose the thread of a high-stakes job.

• Hold the craft. The surface feels fast, clear, and considered. You push back when something doesn't feel right, even when it technically works.

• Raise the bar. Pair with SW Engineers on the harder systems work behind your surface, and contribute beyond your boundary: shared components, product craft, and what excellent building looks like here as the team grows.

🥷 Your skills

Non-negotiables

• You ship end to end: A track record of taking features from idea to production, code included, with clear accountability for whether they worked. Roughly 3+ years building and shipping software in production.

• Genuine customer obsession: A real habit of spending time with users in their work context, with a track record of that depth driving what you build.

• Product taste and craft: The bar is experiences that feel effortless to time-pressured, non-technical users across fragmented, high-stakes workflows. Functional is not the finish line.

• A point of view on agentic product design: How an experience moves from manual operation to supervised delegation, and how automation earns user trust gradually rather than all at once.

• You build rapid prototypes yourself, with AI-assisted tools as a first instinct for testing an idea.

• Solid full-stack engineering with a frontend lean: Production-quality code and sound fundamentals. Systems-specialist depth is not the point of the role.

• Trade-off fluency: You weigh product impact against engineering effort and often find a cheaper route to the same result.

• Strong analytical instinct: You define the metric, build the view, read it, and act without waiting for a data team.

• You operate well in ambiguity and autonomy, and shape the problem rather than waiting for a spec.

Strong signals we look for

• Shipped AI-assisted or agent-driven features in production, particularly where the human stays in the loop.

• Built for a multi-persona, operational, or workflow-heavy B2B product.

• Founder background, or early employee at a startup that scaled materially.

• You've killed or radically changed something you personally believed in and can explain why.

Bonus

• Domain knowledge in automotive, the parts aftermarket, repair, or insurance claims.

• Marketplace or network experience, from the demand or supply side.

• Rust, or genuine eagerness to learn it. It is part of our stack.

🧭 How you'll think and operate

We're not looking for spec-takers or framework experts. We're looking for someone who thinks like this:

"I sat with a parts manager on Tuesday, saw exactly where the order flow broke, prototyped a fix that afternoon, and three shops were testing it by Friday."

"I could build the 'right' version in three weeks, or a version that answers the actual question in two days. I shipped the two-day one, learned it was wrong, and saved myself the three weeks."

"Here's what the usage data shows. Here's what I think it means. Here's the change I made, and here's how I'll know if I was wrong."

"This is my surface. If it feels clunky, that's on me. Let me show you exactly what's clunky and what I'm doing about it."

Speed, ownership, and judgment are the baseline. What sets the best candidates apart is genuine empathy for the customer and the ability to turn that empathy into software that works beautifully in the real world, not just in the demo.

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.

Equal Opportunity Partly is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions at Partly are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. Partly provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities throughout the application and employment process. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please let us know.

🪅 Benefits

• Competitive base salary plus equity. Even though we’re a small startup, we offer competitive salaries and great equity.

• Parental leave and flexible return to work. After returning to work, primary carers can work 4-day weeks for 100% of their pay for the first twelve weeks. For secondary carers, we offer 10 days of leave at full pay.

• Flexible working hours. We’re office-first, but are flexible with hours and working from home when you need to.

• Base yourself with our U.S. team in a brand new WeWork office

• Monthly team lunches to celebrate our wins and enjoy each other's company outside the office.

• Ergonomic workspace. Sit-stand desks, ergonomic chairs, quiet spaces, and collaboration spaces to suit all kinds of working styles.