The posting
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 https://www.partly.com/nz/careers/videos/why-partly-exists and AI at Partly https://www.partly.com/nz/careers/videos/ai-at-partly.
🖍️ THIS ROLE
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, distributed systems, ensuring that both internally critical and externally visible services have the reliability, uptime, and performance appropriate to clients' needs while enabling a fast rate of improvement. SREs maintain constant awareness of system capacity and performance, ensuring our networks, platforms, and tools are scalable, secure, and reliable so engineers can focus on delivering impactful software.
This senior role demands high autonomy, leadership, and strategic thinking, making it ideal for those excited by the challenge of designing and supporting the infrastructure that connects the worlds parts.
💻 WHAT WILL YOU DO
- Reliability Engineering: Ensure the stability, scalability, and security of our cloud infrastructure, Partly & 3rd party applications in our Kubernetes powered clusters. Leverage Infrastructure-as-Code and automation (Terraform for GCP, GitOps with ArgoCD, Custom scripts in Python/Bash, etc.) to deploy and manage workloads and resources in a repeatable, automated way.
- Cost Optimisation: Monitor and optimise costs across our cloud and on-prem infrastructure, ensuring we get maximum value from our investments. Make recommendations for resource allocation or architecture changes to improve cost-efficiency without sacrificing reliability or performance.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with developers, data engineers, and leadership to plan infrastructure needs and improvements. Provide tooling, guidance and training to the engineering team on SRE practices, and collaborate during software delivery to ensure smooth integrations from code to production.
- Software Engineering: Make sure our software meets high production readiness standards. When you see a problem or an opportunity to improve, you drive the solution.
- Troubleshooting: participate in incidents resolutions, give developers helping hand in debugging applications, networks, databases, compute systems.
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/DPDdl
🥷 YOUR SKILLS
- Software Engineering: You excel at developing and maintaining large, established software systems beyond simple scripts and utilities. You definitely know what makes software maintainable and you are able to write robust code.
- Firmly grounded computer science fundamentals: Including data structures, concurrency, architecture, APIs, testing, and design patterns.
- System engineering fundamentals: You most likely know how to deploy and use memory or stack sampling profiler, how to locate excessive lock contention, how to identify network issues, etc.
- SRE Expertise: Hands-on experience with modern SRE practices and tooling – for example, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD or equivalent). You have designed, built, and maintained scalable infrastructure and CI/CD systems.
- Cloud & Systems Knowledge: Deep familiarity with at least one major cloud platform and Linux operating system. You can tune servers, manage databases/storage, and wrangle Kubernetes clusters.
- Ownership & Leadership: High degree of ownership and bias for action, with a proactive approach to solving problems. You take initiative and don’t wait to be told what to do. You have demonstrated leadership through mentoring junior engineers or leading small teams/projects, even if not formally a manager. We’re seeking a track record of ownership over critical systems and successful delivery of complex projects.
- Collaboration & Communication: Excellent communication skills (written and verbal) and a collaborative attitude. You can work across teams and departments – from explaining technical issues to non-technical colleagues, to coordinating with engineers on deployments. You value teamwork and knowledge sharing.
- Adaptability: Willingness to wear multiple hats and adapt to evolving needs. In a fast-growing startup environment, requirements can change – you’re excited by the chance to learn new skills, take on new challenges, and grow with the role.
- Bonus Points:
- Experience in a high-growth startup environment, which means you’re used to the pace and ambiguity.
- Any prior experience maintaining security compliance and certifications in a company is a plus.
- If you have used specific tools we use (GCP, ArgoCD, GitLab CI, Kafka, etc.), that’s great – if not, you can learn quickly.
- If you have significant experience running production workloads over Apache Cassandra and / or Postgres database
- If you developed software in Rust programming language and can mentor other developers on the best practices in Rust.
Please note: if you don't have all the skills/experience listed above but believe you could be outstanding in this role, please still consider applying. Many folks, especially those from underrepresented or marginalised groups, often count themselves out. Please allow us to learn more about you and why you're exceptional!
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.
🛬 RELOCATION
If you are relocating from overseas or domestically to Partly HQ, we offer a generous relocation allowance to support your move
