Principal Product Engineer, US

About this role

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 what’s worth building.

- Build with autonomy. Take a shared understanding of the customer problem through technical design, implementation, and production. Connect the user experience to the underlying systems and make engineering decisions independently. Work with your PM and design when new evidence or trade-offs change the product direction.

- Move quickly through good judgment. Find the simplest approach that serves the customer. Know when to prototype, when to invest, which compromises are acceptable, and where reliability or correctness must hold. Own the consequences of those decisions.

- Choose the right way to learn. Use observation, interviews, manual tests, prototypes, or production code according to what you need to find out. Use AI-assisted tools where they help you learn and deliver faster.

- Follow through on outcomes. Define success with your PM, instrument what you build, and stay accountable for adoption, customer value, and production performance. Reconcile customer feedback with usage data, investigate when they disagree, and change direction when the evidence calls for it.

- Build trustworthy agentic experiences. Work out where automation genuinely helps, where people need control, and how the experience and underlying systems earn trust in high-stakes workflows. Make the product feel clear, fast, and dependable to the people using it.

MULTIPLY THE TEAM’S IMPACT

Your contribution should make the people and systems around you more effective.

- Set strong examples. Demonstrate good engineering judgment, customer understanding, and pragmatic delivery in work others can learn from and build on.

- Build repeatable solutions where they help. Recognise recurring problems and create shared components, tools, or patterns that make future work faster and more reliable. Know when a focused solution is enough and when an abstraction earns its complexity.

- Coach through real work. Pair with teammates, give thoughtful reviews, and explain the reasoning behind decisions. Help others develop the judgment and confidence to work more independently.

- Share what you learn. Make useful customer insights, technical lessons, and approaches easy to find and apply across the team.

WHAT YOU BRING

THE ENGINEERING BASELINE

- Established senior engineering capability. You have substantial experience building and operating production software—typically five or more years—with clear evidence of independent ownership. You can explain the architecture, constraints, failure modes, and trade-offs of technically demanding work you personally delivered. Demonstrated capability matters more than years or previous titles alone.

- Engineering autonomy and sound judgment. You can take an ambiguous problem through to a production solution without needing engineering direction. You know when to seek specialist input and remain accountable for how the whole solution works.

- Strong engineering across the product. You can work across the user…