Principal Product Engineer, US at Partly in Austin, TX

Job description

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 and 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