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Partly is building frontier AI infrastructure for repair, starting with the automotive market. The company's core product, Interpreter, is an AI model trained on 1M+ car models and 1B+ parts that reads repair jobs with 98.8% parts-list accuracy. Partly has raised $50M Series B led by DST Global and is founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers.
As Principal Product Engineer, you will be a hands-on builder who combines deep technical capability with strong product judgment and customer empathy. You'll work closely with a Product Manager and design team to understand customer problems and ship solutions that meaningfully improve how people work.
Key responsibilities:
- Spend time with customers (estimators, parts managers, appraisers, repairers, suppliers) weekly to understand their workflows and distinguish real needs from surface requests.
- Shape product direction with your PM by bringing customer insight, technical understanding, and evidence from shipped work into prioritization decisions.
- Take problems through technical design, implementation, and production autonomously, making independent engineering decisions while staying connected to user experience and underlying systems.
- Move quickly through sound judgment—knowing when to prototype, when to invest, which compromises are acceptable, and where reliability must hold.
- Define success metrics with your PM, instrument your work, and stay accountable for adoption, customer value, and production performance.
- Build trustworthy agentic experiences by working out where automation genuinely helps, where people need control, and how to earn trust in high-stakes workflows.
- Multiply team impact by setting strong examples, building repeatable solutions, coaching teammates through real work, and sharing customer and technical insights.
Partly offers a distributed-first model with offices in Austin (HQ), London, Christchurch, and Auckland. The company will connect you with your nearest office for onboarding and fly you to quarterly "Season Openers" (travel and accommodation covered). Relocation assistance is available if needed.
Requirements:
- Established senior engineering capability with substantial experience building and operating production software (typically 5+ years) and clear evidence of independent ownership. You can explain the architecture, constraints, failure modes, and trade-offs of technically demanding work you personally delivered.
- Engineering autonomy and sound judgment to take ambiguous problems through to production solutions without needing engineering direction.
- Strong engineering across the product stack: you can work across user experience, backend services, and data flows, reason about the system as a whole, make consequential technical decisions, and protect quality that matters.
- Track record of moving quickly and responsibly—simplifying scope, using effective tools, and making deliberate technical trade-offs with clear evidence of how that judgment accelerated delivery.
- Demonstrated customer and business understanding: habit of spending time with users in their work context and showing how that understanding changed what you built.
- Ownership of outcomes: you care whether customers use the solution and whether it improves their work, connecting decisions to customer value and business results.
- Product judgment and craft: you help decide what should exist, how it should work, and what to leave out, building experiences that feel clear and dependable to time-pressured, non-technical users.
- Close, active partnership with your PM, contributing to product thinking throughout discovery and delivery with your own customer understanding and technical judgment.
- Comfort with uncertainty: you work with your PM to clarify problems, then independently work through unknowns in building solutions.
- Analytical approach: you define useful measures with your PM, get the evidence you need, and act on it, distinguishing what data shows from what you're assuming.
- Habit of helping others succeed: you make reasoning clear, give useful feedback, and leave behind code, tools, and knowledge others can build on.
Particularly relevant experience (not required):
- Founder, founding engineer, or early startup work with substantial personal ownership of customer problems and technical delivery.
- 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 of changing or abandoning something you believed in because customer feedback or results showed a better path.
- Automotive, repair, parts, or insurance domain experience.
- Familiarity with Rust (part of Partly's stack).
The essential requirements are established engineering independence and demonstrated ownership of customer problems and outcomes. Unconventional backgrounds are welcome if you can demonstrate these core capabilities.
