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Partly is building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts, with a mission to connect the world's parts and accelerate sustainability. Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers and backed by investors including Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg, and co-founders from Notion and Figma, the company has tripled its team in the last 12 months and plans to double again.
This is a senior design role focused on shaping how product design evolves at an AI-first company. You'll own the design system that engineers and coding agents build AI experiences from, ensuring components, patterns, rules and guidance work for both human engineers and AI models. You'll shape patterns for agentic and generative experiences—deciding when to use natural language conversation, generated UI for dense data, and autonomous agents that handle admin and verification while keeping humans in control of decisions that matter.
Key responsibilities include: owning the design system and ensuring it's the default right choice even when you're not in the room; defining how products behave under uncertainty, showing the agent's reasoning appropriately; establishing product character and tone across all surfaces; holding quality and adoption standards across the product family; building working prototypes with AI tools and testing on real data; pairing directly with engineers on implementation details; spending time with real customers in workshops and on calls; and writing clear principles that both engineers and AI models can follow.
Partly's product aims to automate admin work for repair professionals so they can focus on their craft. The design challenges are novel: how do users unfamiliar with chat interfaces know what to ask? How do repetitive tasks become one-tap actions? How much of an agent's reasoning should be visible before it becomes overwhelming? You'll own finding Partly's answers to these unsolved problems.
The design team is global and works across all products, not embedded in individual product teams. Product Leads own their products and what ships; you own the principles, patterns and system they build from, and you set your own agenda for where those need to evolve. You'll notice when the same job looks different across products and fix it at the source in the system.
Partly operates in discovery mode using Claude Code to build working versions inside the design system, run them against real data, and show customers features with their own jobs in flight. In scale mode, engineering rebuilds what's proven. Designers work in both modes.
The role is based in one of Partly's offices: Auckland or Christchurch (New Zealand), London (UK), or Austin (Texas). The company flies the global team together quarterly for "Season Openers" and covers travel and accommodation. Relocation assistance is available.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Senior experience evidenced by running projects end-to-end with measurable changes in user behavior; typically 5+ years designing complex software (evidence matters more than years)
- Shipped agentic experiences or built seriously on your own time; demonstrated understanding of tasks, tools, autonomy, human-in-the-loop, and evaluation decisions
- Systems thinking with contributions to or building a design system that engineers adopted organically; understanding of systems designed for coding agents as primary users
- Production-grade craft: real states, edge cases, real data; deep fluency in interaction design, copy, and visual taste for dense technical tools
- Product judgment: ability to move from fuzzy briefs to problem definition, constraints, and testable versions; comfort explaining trade-offs and disagreements; building to learn
- Comfort working across multiple product teams simultaneously while maintaining a coherent cross-product perspective
- Curiosity about customers: professionals with high expectations, low friction tolerance, and workflows shaped by industry convention
- Clear written, verbal, and visual communication
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience designing workflow-heavy, data-dense, or technically complex B2B products
- Background in marketplace, catalogue, e-commerce, or supply chain domains (automotive is a bonus)
- High-growth startup and scale-up experience
- Experience in global, distributed design teams
