Principal Product Engineer, US

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.
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 experiences. Work out where automation genuinely helps, where people need control, and how the experience and underlying systems earn trust in high-stakes workflows. Make the product feel clear, fast, and dependable to the people using it.

Multiply the team's impact

Your contribution should make the people and systems around you more effective.

• Set strong examples. Demonstrate good engineering judgment, customer understanding, and pragmatic delivery in work others can learn from and build on.
• Build repeatable solutions where they help. Recognise recurring problems and create shared components, tools, or patterns that make future work faster and more reliable. Know when a focused solution is enough and when an abstraction earns its complexity.
• Coach through real work. Pair with teammates, give thoughtful reviews, and explain the reasoning behind decisions. Help others develop the judgment and confidence to work more independently.
• Share what you learn. Make useful customer insights, technical lessons, and approaches easy to find and apply across the team.

What you bring
The engineering baseline

• Established senior engineering capability. You have substantial experience building and operating production software-typically five or more years-with clear evidence of independent ownership. You can explain the architecture, constraints, failure modes, and trade-offs of technically demanding work you personally delivered. Demonstrated capability matters more than years or previous titles alone.
• Engineering autonomy and sound judgment. You can take an ambiguous problem through to a production solution without needing engineering direction. You know when to seek specialist input and remain accountable for how the whole solution works.
• Strong engineering across the product. You can work across the user experience, backend services, and data flows needed to solve the problem. Your depth may vary by area, but you can reason about the system as a whole, make consequential technical decisions, and protect the quality that matters.
• A track record of moving quickly and responsibly. You simplify scope, use effective tools, and make deliberate technical trade-offs. You can show where that judgment accelerated delivery, what quality you protected, and what happened to the compromises afterwards.

What makes you right for this role

• Customer and business understanding. You have a habit of spending time with users in their work context and can show how that understanding changed what you built-or whether you built it at all.
• Ownership of outcomes. You care whether customers use the solution and whether it improves their work. You can connect your decisions to customer value and business results, and you follow through beyond launch.
• Product judgment and craft. You help decide what should exist, how it should work, and what to leave out. You build experiences that feel clear and dependable to time-pressured, non-technical users.
• A close, active partnership with your PM. You contribute to product thinking throughout discovery and delivery, bringing your own customer understanding and technical judgment. You can move forward without a detailed specification while keeping your PM involved in consequential product decisions.
• Comfort with uncertainty. You work with your PM to clarify the problem, then independently work through the unknowns involved in building the solution. You make progress without needing every detail settled upfront.
• An analytical approach. You can define useful measures with your PM, get the evidence you need, and act on it. You distinguish what the data shows from what you're assuming.
• A habit of helping others succeed. You make your reasoning clear, give useful feedback, and leave behind code, tools, and knowledge that others can build on.

Particularly relevant experience

• Founder, founding engineer, or early startup work with substantial personal ownership of customer problems and technical delivery. What you owned, learned, and delivered matters more than the company's eventual size or success.
• Operational or workflow-heavy B2B products, marketplaces, or systems serving multiple types of user.
• AI-assisted or agent-driven features in production, especially where human oversight and trust matter.
• Evidence that you changed or abandoned something you believed in because customer feedback or results showed a better path.

Experience in automotive, repair, parts, or insurance is useful, as is familiarity with Rust, which is part of our stack. Neither is required.

You don't need every technology or domain experience listed here. The essential requirements are established engineering independence and demonstrated ownership of customer problems and outcomes. If you can show those through an unconventional background, we'd like to hear from you.