Product Engineer, NZ, Workshop
Partly · Christchurch
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 and AI at Partly.
🖍️ This role
This is a product-builder role, not a ticket-taking one. You own a product surface end to end: you talk to the customer, form the idea, build it, ship it, measure it, and decide what happens next. The same person who understands the repairer writes the code. There is no handoff for product quality to leak through.
You'll build at the center of a multi-trillion-dollar industry that still runs on phone calls, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Replacement parts is one of the largest physical markets on earth and one of the least digitized, and there is no established playbook to copy. Partly is creating the category.
Our moat is Interpreter, a domain-specific AI model that understands parts, vehicles, and the messy real-world relationships between them in ways general-purpose models cannot. It is what lets software finally make sense of a physical, offline industry, and it is the engine underneath everything you build.
And what you build is changing shape. We are not bolting AI onto old screens. We are creating genuinely new agentic experiences for a broad spectrum of users, from estimators and parts managers to accountants and suppliers, where people express intent and supervise outcomes while agents handle the mechanical work. Designing how that trust is earned, surface by surface, while each one still delivers value today, is the heart of the role.
You'll work at an inflection point in how software itself gets built. AI-assisted development has collapsed the distance between an idea and a working version of it. The builders we want already work this way: they prototype in an afternoon, put it in front of real customers within days, and read the signal themselves. We want someone who works like that now, or is visibly building toward it.
💻 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 does not 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.
Please note: if you don't have all the skills/experience listed above but believe you could be outstanding in this role, please still consider applying. Many folks, especially those from underrepresented or marginalized groups, often count themselves out. Please allow us to learn more about you and why you're exceptional!
🧭 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.
🎁 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.
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