Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer, Austin

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 connecting the world's parts, and we're doing that by building the AI infrastructure layer for the global repair industry, starting with the $2tn automotive market. Our frontier model, Interpreter, is the world's first AI purpose-built to understand vehicle damage and the parts needed to fix it. Thousands of businesses across the global repair supply chain already rely on it.

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we've tripled in size in the last 18 months and have recently raised a $50m Series B led by DST Global (Anthropic, Airbnb, Meta, TikTok, Spotify) and including Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), WNDR, Activant Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Square Peg, Airtree, and Ecliptic Venture Capital. We're headquartered in Austin, with offices in New Zealand and London.

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

There is no canonical map of the world's parts. Every manufacturer, distributor, recycler and insurer describes the same component differently; a different number, a different name, a different language, a different idea of what it even fits. Partly is building the system that resolves all of it, and the platform that thousands of businesses run their operations on top of.

We're hiring a Staff and Senior Staff Engineers to lead technically on that work. Not to sit above it, to be in it. You'll own the systems that matter most, set direction on problems that cross team boundaries, and direct the work and the output of the engineers around you. You'll write production code, and you'll spend real time making other engineers better.

The timing matters. We've tripled in size in 18 months with a $50m Series B behind us. The architecture you choose now is what the next hundred engineers inherit. Very few engineers get to make decisions with that much leverage.

💻 What you'll do

• Own mission-critical systems end to end, design, build, operate. Our SaaS platform and public API sit in the middle of real commercial transactions. When they're slow or wrong, vehicles don't get repaired.

• Set technical direction beyond your own team. You'll lead architecture across services and teams, and make the reliability, consistency and performance trade-offs that come with it, then write it down clearly enough that others can build on it.

• Direct the work. You'll break ambiguous problems into scope a team can execute, review designs, and hold the bar on what ships. Technical leadership without line management.

• Solve problems at the scale of the domain. millions of parts, vehicle configurations, markets and languages, and the fitment relationships between all of them. Getting this model right is the product, and nobody has done it properly before.

• Build the platform Interpreter runs on. Serving a frontier model to thousands of businesses across the repair supply chain makes latency, cost, evaluation and correctness first-class engineering problems.

• Work across the stack. Deep backend and data work most of the time, and the product surfaces our customers actually touch when that's where the problem is. You'll follow problems wherever they lead.

• Raise the engineering bar: design review, mentoring, pragmatic standards, and code that teaches people something.

• Become one of the few people in the world who deeply understands this domain. A $2tn market, structurally under-served, and almost entirely unmodelled.

🥷 Your skills

• Typically 6+ years building and operating complex production systems, with several of those spent at a level where your influence reached well beyond the code you personally wrote.

• A track record of owning systems across team boundaries, you've been accountable for something important, not just a contributor to it.

• Firmly g