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

Partly is a fast-moving scale-up. We're bringing on thousands of new customers, and the UX of our product needs to mature at the pace they expect, while we're simultaneously moving quickly toward an AI-first experience, built around Interpreter, our frontier model for understanding vehicle damage and the parts needed to fix it. That's the gap this role exists to close: growth and ambition are outrunning polish, and we need someone who can catch it up without slowing it down.

You'll be the craft engine of the design function: the designer our product engineers and PMs build with, across multiple product areas and multiple projects at once. Engineering teams at Partly ship fast. Sometimes faster than design can traditionally keep up with. Your job is to make them faster still, while raising the quality of everything they ship.

This role starts with the craft and it grows from there. Designers who show they can own outcomes, not just output, will be handed more to own: a feature workstream end-to-end, a growing slice of the design system, and over time a product area or customer group. Part of the Head of Design's job is delegating real ownership to designers who've earned it. We do that on evidence, not tenure, and there is no shortage of things waiting to be owned.

💻 What you'll do

Own the craft, not the strategy

• Take data-dense workflows, a parts seller managing a catalogue of 500,000+ SKUs across multiple vehicle fitment hierarchies from working-but-rough to an experience a professional trusts, at the pace the team ships

• Design search and discovery experiences where a wrong match has real consequences. A brake pad that doesn't fit a vehicle isn't a bad recommendation, it's a safety issue

• Take accountability for the quality bar on what you touch, direction belongs to your product lead, the experience is yours

Build for scale, not just this screen

• Build the components, patterns, and guidance in our design system that make the right experience the default, for every engineer, and for the AI coding agents that increasingly build alongside them

• Contribute rules and guardrails, not just components, so the right choice is the easy choice even when you're not in the room

Get ahead of engineering, not behind it

• Write the early artifacts, job stories, user stories, flows that give an engineering team enough context to run without waiting on a design review

• Show up before the build starts, not as a check afterward

Move at the speed of the team

• Turn design requests around at a pace that makes teams faster, not slower, across parallel projects

• Support our teams in New Zealand, the UK, and the US pick up the work that's currently going untouched, especially in the UK

• Design for the messy reality of production: states, edge cases, error paths, and real data — not just the happy path in a prototype

Raise the bar

• Give direct, specific feedback in critique that makes other designers, PMs, and engineers do better work

• Set a standard through your own shipped output that others learn from, with or without you in the room

Earn more

• Take on a workstream end-to-end once you've shown you can be trusted with it

• Grow your slice of the design system, and over time a product area or customer group, based on evidence — not tenure
  

🥷 What you bring

Non-negotiables

• Senior product design experience, typically 5+ years designing complex software products

• A portfolio of shipped work where the craft held up in production: real states, real edge cases, real data. Not just polished prototypes

• Deep fluency in interaction design, UX design, and prototyping to explore, test, and communicate ideas quickly

• Experience contributing to or building design systems that other people, engineers especially, naturally reach to first

• Strong judgment inside a defined problem: you can explain the trade-off you made, what you gave up, and why

• Genuine curiosity about the people who use what you build. Our customers are professionals, repairers and parts sellers, with high expectations and low tolerance for friction

• Clear communication skills including written, verbal, and visual along with the ability to explain your rationale and influence the people you work alongside

Strong signals we look for

• A design system contribution: a component, a pattern, a guideline that other teams adopted without you having to push it

• A track record of real scope expansion in the last 1–2 years: not a title change, an actual widening of what you're trusted to own

• AI-assisted design workflows as part of how you already work, not something you're adjusting to

• Comfort working directly alongside engineers with no design review gate, that is making the call in the moment and being accountable for it

• Something you shipped that you'd now do differently, and the specifics of what and why

Bonus

• Experience designing workflow-heavy, data-dense, or technically complex B2B products

• Experience collaborating closely with research or using quantitative data to validate design decisions

• Experience in marketplace, catalogue, e-commerce, or supply chain domains

• Experience working in high-growth startup environments

🧭 How you'll think and operate

We're not looking for someone who waits to be told what to build, or someone who needs to own the roadmap to care about the outcome. We're looking for someone who thinks like this:

"I didn't wait for the brief to be perfect — I shipped the first version this afternoon, and the engineer building it already has what they need."

"The edge case that shows up in production matters more to me right now than the polish on the happy path."

"Here's the trade-off I made. Here's what I gave up. Here's why."

"I've been trusted with more every quarter, because I keep proving I can handle what I'm given — I don't need the title to change first."

"It's not my strategy. I still make it better."

Craft, speed, and judgment inside a defined problem are the baseline. What differentiates the best candidates is how much better everything gets because they were the one who touched it — and how quickly they earn the right to touch more.

🎡 What makes this role hard (and interesting)

• The domain is genuinely complex: vehicle fitment, parts taxonomy, and catalogue management are not intuitive problem spaces. You'll need to learn deeply and quickly.

• Our customers are professionals, not casual consumers. They have high expectations, low tolerance for friction, and workflows shaped by decades of industry convention.

• We're building global infrastructure, so our solutions need to work across different markets, languages, and parts standards.

• This is an engineering-led company. Teams ship fast, sometimes without a designer in the room. Part of your job is raising the floor of what ships when you're not there — through the design system, guidance, and the standard you set. You'll need to be energised by that, not threatened by it.

• You'll often join work that's already moving. The win is making it better without slowing it down — knowing when a week of refinement is worth it, and when it isn't.

• Speed is a core value, not a buzzword. Most decisions are reversible, and a good solution shipped this week beats a perfect one shipped next month.

• The team is small and the expectations are high.

Please note: if you don't have all the skills listed above but believe you'd be a great fit, we'd still love to hear from you.

🎁 Benefits

• Healthy, Catered Lunches - Enjoy fresh, healthy lunches every workday in our Auckland, Christchurch, London, and Austin offices. With no meal prep needed, you can eat, connect, and refuel with your team. (And yes, snacks and drinks are always on hand.)

• Healthy Body, Healthy Mind - We care about performing at our peak. Every team member gets a $1,500 annual wellness allowance (or local equivalent) on a Partly-branded card. Use it on things such as gym memberships, rock climbing, physical therapy, massage, doctor visits, prescriptions—anything that you or your family need!

• Family Comes First - Primary caregivers receive 3 months of fully paid parental leave, plus a flexible return-to-work plan (four days a week at full pay for your first three months back).

• Workspaces That Inspire - Our brand-new, architecturally designed offices are built for collaboration and creativity, with great coffee, social spaces, and some of the best cafes just a few steps away.

• Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or coworking space (atleast 4 days a week), choose from a paid 24/7 parking spot or a commuting allowance. One less thing to think about!

• Office-First with Flexibility - In cities where we have an office (Christchurch, Auckland, London, and Austin), we default to working from the office every day. This lets us move faster, make better decisions, and build strong relationships. We also operate with a high-trust environment, so you can manage your time around your life and flex your schedule to do your best work.

• Time Off - you can use your annual leave and sick leave from day one, no waiting to accrue it first. And if you ever go into a negative balance, that's fine too, we trust you to manage your own time off

• We Celebrate Together - From weekly happy hours and monthly lunches to quarterly season openers and an annual global offsite, we make time to connect, celebrate, and have fun as one team.

• Giving - We support charitable giving and will top up your donation by 33% for charities on the GiveWell list

• Equity - You'll receive share options (ESOP) with a 4-year vesting schedule and a 1-year cliff, true ownership in Partly from day one. Your strike price is a flat $0.01 per share, and you have up to 10 years to exercise.