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's mission is to connect the world's parts and we're doing that by building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts. Our big vision is to accelerate the world towards a sustainable future where waste is eliminated and all replacement parts are universally searchable, accessible and available to all.
Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we utilise bleeding-edge technology to solve challenging but exciting problems that make a huge impact in a $1.9 trillion industry. We've more than tripled our team over the last 12 months and expect to double in size again over the coming 12 months. We're a global team spanning both Europe and Australasia.
We provide a scalable digital infrastructure solution to some of the world's largest businesses and the most exciting startups. Partly's solutions are integrated across hundreds of companies globally, providing the backbone for cataloguing and managing parts online.
Our investors in Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), Square Peg, Octopus Ventures, Icehouse, Peter Beck (Rocket Lab), Akshay Kothari (Notion Co-Founder) and Dylan Field (Figma Co-Founder).
We're continuing to build a world-class team and ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built at Partly, and our values are lived throughout every experience.
The opportunity
Repairers train for years to be on the tools, then spend half their day on quotes, paperwork and finding parts. Partly's product aims to automate the admin so repairers can focus on their craft. The products we've launched this year start with a conversation, and behind it a system generates the interface the moment needs. So we no longer design a set of pages. We design components, and then we design the brain the AI uses to assemble them. Very few designers have done this yet. That's the opportunity: to work out what product design becomes at an AI company, in a domain where a wrong answer is a $1,000 part that can't be returned.
The problems are real and unsolved. How does someone who's never used a chat interface know what to ask when they land on an empty box between phone calls? How does a task you do forty times a day become one tap, not one more sentence to type, with the same result every time? How much of the agent's reasoning do you show before trust turns into a wall of text? Where should the interface be opinionated, and where should it be generated? We don't have the answers yet. You'll own finding Partly's.
🖍️ The role
Our product teams are organised around a product, each led by a Product Lead (Principal Product Manager) with a Product Engineer and a mix of engineers. Design is not embedded in those teams. We're building a global design team that works across all of our products and is focused on three things: the design system everything is built from, coherence across the whole product family, and the quality of the experience wherever a repairer or supplier meets us. Our customers range from repairers and parts admins in a single independent workshop to multi-billion-dollar repair groups, and the suppliers who provide their parts. The team exists to drive adoption and stickiness through experiences that feel magical, in a way that works for our customers. We work collaboratively with the Product Leads who drive their products.
This is a senior design role for someone with incredible judgement and hands-on experience with AI surfaces and experiences. You lead with design: problem framing, systems thinking, interaction and craft. And you make things real, with working prototypes built inside our design system.
You won't sit in a product team's backlog. 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 go next. When something ships below the bar, you're the one who says so.
This role is based in one of our offices: Auckland or Christchurch in New Zealand, London in the UK, or Austin, Texas in the US. The design team works across all of them.
💻 What you'll do
Own the design system that engineers and coding agents build our AI experiences from. Components, patterns, rules and guidance that read correctly to an engineer and to a coding agent, so the right choice is the default even when you're not in the room.
Shape and ship the patterns for agentic and generative experiences. Natural language where conversation fits, generated UI where the data is dense, and agents that take on the admin, verification and sourcing around a repair while the person keeps the decisions that matter.
Define how the product behaves when it's uncertain. When the agent acts, proposes or asks, in line with the cost of being wrong. How it shows its work, how a person corrects it, and who's right when they disagree.
Give the product its character. How our agents speak to a repairer, their tone, when they're brief and when they explain. A personality people recognise on every surface where they meet us.
Hold the bar across every product. Notice when the same job looks different in two products and fix it at the source, in the system rather than page by page. Measure adoption and quality, and hold teams to them.
Work with real prototypes. Build working versions with AI tools inside our design system, test them on real data, and put them in front of repairers and suppliers.
Pair with engineers, no hand-offs. Work directly with Product Engineers and their teams, polish the details together, and review the UI that coding agents produce from the system.
Spend real time with customers. In the workshop, on the phone and in the product, running research alongside the Product Leads who hold the deep customer context in each region.
Write the principles and rules. How the experience behaves on behalf of a person, written clearly enough that an engineer and a model can both follow them.
🥷 What you bring
Senior experience, evidenced. You've been trusted to run a project end to end and can point to the user behaviour that changed because of it. Typically 5+ years designing complex software; the evidence matters more than the years.
You've designed agentic experiences, and can show the work. Shipped at work or built seriously on your own time. Tasks, tools, autonomy, human-in-the-loop, evaluation: you've made real calls on what an agent does alone, what it proposes and what it asks, and you can tell us which of those calls were wrong.
Systems thinking. You've contributed to or built a design system that engineers reached for without being told to, and you have a view on what a system needs to be when its heaviest user is a coding agent.
Craft that holds up in production. Real states, real edge cases, real data. Deep fluency in interaction design, copy that carries its weight, and the visual taste to make a dense, technical tool look considered.
Product judgement. You can take a fuzzy brief and produce the problem, the constraints and the first testable version, and you can explain a trade-off you made and who disagreed. You build to learn, and you know when your prototype is lying to you.
Comfort working with several product teams at once, respecting that each Product Lead drives their product while bringing a view that spans all of them, and comfortable telling them when it isn't good enough yet.
Curiosity about our customers. Professionals with high expectations, low tolerance for friction, and workflows shaped by decades of industry convention.
Clear written, verbal and visual communication.
Nice to have
Experience designing workflow-heavy, data-dense or technically complex B2B products.
Marketplace, catalogue, e-commerce or supply chain domains. Automotive is a bonus, not a requirement.
High-growth startup and scale-up environments.
Experience working in a global, distributed design team.
We're not looking for a designer whose strength is producing a hundred screens in a traditional SaaS model, or one who is apprehensive about AI. If half the work makes you nervous, this isn't the role.
How we build
We're an AI research company and we build like one. In discovery mode, anyone, designers included, can use Claude Code to build a working version inside our design system, run it against real data, and show a customer the feature with their own jobs in flight. In scale mode, engineering rebuilds what's proven. We don't ship prototype code to production; we use it to decide what production should be. Designers work in both.
🎁 Our Benefits
Healthy, Catered Lunches - Enjoy fresh, healthy lunches every workday in our Auckland, Christchurch, London and San Francisco 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 gym memberships, rock climbing, physio, massage, GP 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 (four days on full pay for your first three months back).
Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or co-working space, choose from a paid 24/7 car park or commute allowance. One less thing to think about!
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 a few steps away.
Office-First with Flexibility - In cities where we have an office (Christchurch, Auckland, London, San Francisco), we default there every day. This let's us move faster, make better decisions and build strong relationships. We also operate with a very high trust environment, so you can manage your time around your life, and flex your schedule to get your best work done.
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.