Principal Product Engineer, US

The posting, as Partly wrote it

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 building the infrastructure for anyone to repair anything. We believe everything built should be repairable, and we're building frontier AI to put repair knowledge to work, starting with the $2tn automotive market.

Our model, Interpreter, is the first AI purpose-built to understand repair. Trained on 1M+ car models and 1B+ parts, it reads a repair job the way an estimator does, resolves damage into the exact purchasable part, and shows its reasoning with a confidence score. On real production jobs, an estimator working with Interpreter reaches 98.8% parts-list accuracy, against 92.1% with today's tools. It powers PartlyRepair, used by collision shops, workshops and suppliers to take the admin off the job; PartlyLabs, the agentic infrastructure enterprises use to deploy Interpreter across their own workflows; and a developer API.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we've raised a $50m Series B led by DST Global (Anthropic, Airbnb, Meta, TikTok, Spotify), with Blackbird Ventures, WNDR, Activant Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Square Peg, Airtree and Ecliptic Venture Capital. Hear it from the team: Why Partly exists https://www.partly.com/nz/careers/videos/why-partly-exists and AI at Partly https://www.partly.com/nz/careers/videos/ai-at-partly.

THE ROLE

You’re a builder: an experienced engineer who wants to understand the customer’s problem, work out a useful solution, and build it yourself. You’re happiest close to customers and hands-on in the code, turning what you learn into software that improves how people work.

Strong engineering is table stakes. Your experience gives you the judgment to make sound technical decisions, move quickly, and take solutions through to production autonomously. You use that independence to focus on customer value.

You’ll work closely with a Product Manager and design to understand problems and shape solutions. You bring your own product judgment, work through the details as you build, and stay accountable for whether the result makes a meaningful difference.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Understand the work firsthand. Spend time with estimators, parts managers, appraisers, repairers, and suppliers. Understand their workflows, constraints, and workarounds well enough to distinguish what they ask for from what would make a meaningful difference. This is a core weekly activity.
• Shape the product with your PM. Bring customer insight, technical understanding, and evidence from what you’ve shipped into decisions about priorities and solutions. Work closely with your PM to challenge assumptions, weigh opportunities, and decide wha

[…]
eave out. You build experiences that feel clear and dependable to time-pressured, non-technical users.

• A close, active partnership with your PM. You contribute to product thinking throughout discovery and delivery, bringing your own customer understanding and technical judgment. You can move forward without a detailed specification while keeping your PM involved in consequential product decisions.
• Comfort with uncertainty. You work with your PM to clarify the problem, then independently work through the unknowns involved in building the solution. You make progress without needing every detail settled upfront.
• An analytical approach. You can define useful measures with your PM, get the evidence you need, and act on it. You distinguish what the data shows from what you’re assuming.
• A habit of helping others succeed. You make your reasoning clear, give useful feedback, and leave behind code, tools, and knowledge that others can build on.

PARTICULARLY RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

• Founder, founding engineer, or early startup work with substantial personal ownership of customer problems and technical delivery. What you owned, learned, and delivered matters more than the company’s eventual size or success.
• Operational or workflow-heavy B2B products, marketplaces, or systems serving multiple types of user.
• AI-assisted or agent-driven features in production, especially where human oversight and trust matter.
• Evidence that you changed or abandoned something you believed in because customer feedback or results showed a better path.

Experience in automotive, repair, parts, or insurance is useful, as is familiarity with Rust, which is part of our stack. Neither is required.

You don’t need every technology or domain experience listed here. The essential requirements are established engineering independence and demonstrated ownership of customer problems and outcomes. If you can show those through an unconventional background, we’d like to hear from you.