Software Engineering Lead, 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 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.

🖍️ This role

Partly builds frontier AI for repair. Our agentic platform combines Interpreter’s repair knowledge with agents that execute complex workflows across the software the industry already uses. The engineering challenge is making that work correct, dependable and scalable.

We’re hiring a hands-on Software Engineering Lead in Austin as our first US software engineering hire. You’ll own the architecture and production systems in a core area of the platform, write substantial production code, and set a high engineering bar.

Product Leads own product direction and outcomes. Product Engineers own customer discovery, product surfaces and adoption. You own technical decisions and the quality of the systems behind them.

💻 What you'll own

• Own core systems behind our agentic platform. Design, write and operate the production code, services and data models your area depends on.

• Make agent execution reliable. Own orchestration, tool execution, evaluation, observability, permissions and failure recovery, including controls for human intervention.

• Set technical direction across system boundaries. Choose simple architectures and make disciplined trade-offs in correctness, performance, reliability, security and cost.

• Set and uphold the engineering bar. Lead design and code reviews, strengthen testing, and solve the hardest implementation and production problems yourself.

🥷 Your skills

• Typically 6+ years building and operating complex production systems, with substantial recent hands-on coding.

• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, API design and data modelling.

• A track record of owning architecture and production reliability across services and teams.

• Sound engineering judgment: you simplify complex problems without compromising correctness, security or maintainability.

Our stack is Rust, TypeScript, React, Postgres and GCP. Strong engineers pick up new languages quickly, and plenty of ours learned Rust here.

Bonus: Rust; production AI or agentic systems; automotive, parts or supply-chain experience; people management.

Please note: if you don't have all the skills or experience listed above but believe you could be outstanding in this role, please still consider applying. Many people count themselves out. We'd love the chance to learn more about you and why you're exceptional.

🎁 Benefits (US)

These benefits apply to permanent US employees and employees on fixed-term contracts of at least 12 months. Benefits are subject to change and are not contractual.

• Health insurance. Partly provides health, dental and vision coverage, paying 100% of your premium and 50% of premiums for dependents you add, including a spouse or domestic partner.

• 401(k). Partly automatically contributes 4% of your base salary every pay period, whether or not you contribute. Employer contributions vest immediately.

• Time off. 20 days of paid vacation, 10 days of paid sick leave and 11 federal holidays each year. You can use vacation and sick leave from day one, including a negative balance.

• Family support. After completing probation, primary caregivers receive 3 months of fully paid parental leave and can return on 4 days a week at full pay for their first 3 months back. Secondary caregivers receive 2 weeks of fully paid leave after completing probation.

• Wellness allowance. USD 1,000 each year for your or your family's health and wellbeing, prorated if you join during the April 1 to March 31 benefit year.

• Life and disability insurance. Employer-paid life, accidental death and dismemberment, short-term disability and long-term disability coverage, plus an employee assistance programme, caregiving support and cancer support.

• Pre-tax benefits. Access to eligible healthcare, dependent care and commuting benefits through Rippling Flex Benefits.

• Austin office. Work from our downtown Austin office with catered lunches every workday, snacks and drinks. We default to working from the office every day, with flexibility to manage your schedule around your life.

• Commuting. If you commute to the Austin office at least 4 days a week, choose a car park or a USD 100 monthly commuting allowance.

• Team connection. Weekly happy hours, monthly team lunches, quarterly season openers and an annual offsite.

• Equity. Share options through our ESOP, with a 4-year vesting schedule, a 1-year cliff and up to 10 years to exercise. The talent team will explain the ESOP framework and your offer terms during the offer process.

📍 Location

Austin, Texas, United States. This is an in-office role based in our downtown Austin office, with flexibility to manage your schedule.

Equal opportunity

Partly is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions at Partly are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. Partly provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities throughout the application and employment process. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please let us know.