Product Engineer, NZ, Workshop

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. This position is based in our Christchurch office.

🚀 OUR STORY

Partly's mission is to connect the world's parts and we're doing that by building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts. Our big vision is to accelerate the world towards a sustainable future where anyone can fix anything.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we utilize cutting-edge technology to solve challenging but exciting problems that make a huge impact in a $1.9 trillion industry. We've more than tripled our team over the last 12 months and expect to double in size again over the coming 12 months. We're a global team spanning both Europe and Australasia.

We provide a scalable digital infrastructure solution to some of the world's largest businesses and the most exciting startups. Partly's solutions are integrated across hundreds of companies globally, providing the backbone for cataloging and managing parts online.

Our investors include Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), Square Peg, Octopus Ventures, Icehouse, Peter Beck (Rocket Lab), Akshay Kothari (Notion Co-Founder) and Dylan Field (Figma Co-Founder).

We're continuing to build a world-class team and ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built at Partly, 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

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…