Staff Software 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

🖍️ This role

There is no canonical map of the world's parts. Every manufacturer, distributor, recycler and insurer describes the same component differently; a different number, a different name, a different language, a different idea of what it even fits. Partly is building the system that resolves all of it, and the platform that thousands of businesses run their operations on top of.

We're hiring a Staff and Senior Staff Engineers to lead technically on that work. Not to sit above it, to be in it. You'll own the systems that matter most, set direction on problems that cross team boundaries, and direct the work and the output of the engineers around you. You'll write production code, and you'll spend real time making other engineers better.

The timing matters. We've tripled in size in 18 months with a $50m Series B behind us. The architecture you choose now is what the next hundred engineers inherit. Very few engineers get to make decisions with that much leverage.

💻 What you'll do

• Own mission-critical systems end to end, design, build, operate. Our SaaS platform and public API sit in the middle of real commercial transactions. When they're slow or wrong, vehicles don't get repaired.

• Set technical direction beyond your own team. You'll lead architecture across services and teams, and make the reliability, consistency and performance trade-offs that come with it, then write it down clearly enough that others can build on it.

• Direct the work. You'll break ambiguous problems into scope a team can execute, review designs, and hold the bar on what ships. Technical leadership without line management.

• Solve problems at the scale of the domain. millions of parts, vehicle configurations, markets and languages, and the fitment relationships between all of them. Getting this model right is the product, and nobody has done it properly before.

• Build the platform Interpreter runs on. Serving a frontier model to thousands of businesses across the repair supply chain makes latency, cost, evaluation and correctness first-class engineering problems.

• Work across the stack. Deep backend and data work most of the time, and the product surfaces our customers actually touch when that's where the problem is. You'll follow problems wherever they lead.

• Raise the engineering bar: design review, mentoring, pragmatic standards, and code that teaches people something.

• Become one of the few people in the world who deeply understands this domain. A $2tn market, structurally under-served, and almost entirely unmodelled.

🥷 Your skills

• Typically 6+ years building and operating complex production systems, with several of those spent at a level where your influence reached well beyond the code you personally wrote.

• A track record of owning systems across team boundaries, you've been accountable for something important, not just a contributor to it.

• Firmly grounded fundamentals: data structures, concurrency, distributed systems, architecture, API design, testing, and the judgment to know which patterns to leave out.

• Strong instincts for data modelling (relational and NoSQL) and clear views on when a model is wrong.

• Experience building reliable, fault-tolerant distributed systems, including taking something from startup-grade to properly dependable at scale.

• Excellent written communication. At this level the design doc is the work.

• You make the engineers around you better, deliberately.

Our stack is Rust on the backend, TypeScript and React on the front end, Postgres, and GCP. We care far more about how you think than which tools you've used, strong engineers pick up new languages quickly, and plenty of ours learned Rust here.

Bonus

• Experience with Rust

• Experience in automotive, parts, logistics or supply chain

• Experience building or operating ML/AI systems in production

   

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).

• 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.

• Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or coworking space (atleast 4 days a week), choose from a paid 24/7 parking spot or a commuting allowance. One less thing to think about!

• 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.

• Time Off - you can use your annual leave and sick leave from day one, no waiting to accrue it first. And if you ever go into a negative balance, that's fine too, we trust you to manage your own time off

• 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.

• Giving - We support charitable giving and will top up your donation by 33% for charities on the GiveWell list

• Equity - You'll receive share options (ESOP) with a 4-year vesting schedule and a 1-year cliff, true ownership in Partly from day one. Your strike price is a flat $0.01 per share, and you have up to 10 years to exercise.
  

🛬 Relocation

If you're relocating to Partly HQ, whether from overseas or within the country, we offer a generous relocation allowance to help support your move.