Principal Product Engineer, US

Partly • Austin, TX

3d

About The Position

Partly is seeking a hands-on, experienced engineer to understand customer problems and independently build software that improves how people work. The Principal Product Engineer works closely with a Product Manager and design, bringing customer insight, technical judgment, and product judgment to discovery, prioritization, solution design, implementation, and production outcomes. The role emphasizes spending time with customers and understanding their workflows, making sound technical decisions autonomously, and remaining accountable for adoption, customer value, and production performance.

The engineer will help build trustworthy agentic experiences for high-stakes workflows, identifying where automation helps and where users need control. They will also multiply the team's impact through strong engineering examples, reusable solutions where appropriate, coaching teammates through real work, and sharing customer and technical learnings.

Partly builds AI-powered repair products and infrastructure, including Interpreter, PartlyRepair, PartlyLabs, and a developer API. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in London, Christchurch, and Auckland. Employees are connected with a nearby office for onboarding and travel to quarterly Season Openers; relocation cost assistance may be available for those relocating to join the company.

Requirements

• Substantial experience building and operating production software, typically five or more years, with clear evidence of independent ownership.
• Ability to explain the architecture, constraints, failure modes, and trade-offs of technically demanding work personally delivered.
• Ability to take an ambiguous problem through to a production solution without needing engineering direction, while knowing when to seek specialist input.
• Ability to work across user experience, backend services, and data flows, reason about the system as a whole, and make consequential technical decisions.
• Track record of delivering quickly and responsibly, including simplifying scope, making deliberate trade-offs, and protecting important quality attributes.
• Habit of spending time with users in their work context and evidence that customer understanding influenced what was built or whether it was built.
• Ownership of customer and business outcomes beyond launch, including connecting decisions to customer value and business results.
• Product judgment to decide what should exist, how it should work, and what to leave out, with a focus on clear and dependable experiences for time-pressured, non-technical users.
• Ability to partner actively with a Product Manager throughout discovery and delivery, contribute customer and technical judgment, and proceed without a detailed specification while keeping the PM involved in consequential decisions.
• Comfort working with uncertainty and making progress without every detail settled upfront.
• Analytical approach: ability to define useful measures, gather evidence, distinguish data from assumptions, and act on findings.
• Habit of helping others succeed through clear reasoning, useful feedback, and code, tools, and knowledge others can build on.

Nice To Haves

• Founder, founding engineer, or early startup experience with substantial personal ownership of customer problems and technical delivery.
• Experience with operational or workflow-heavy B2B products, marketplaces, or systems serving multiple types of users.
• Experience delivering AI-assisted or agent-driven features in production, especially where human oversight and trust matter.
• Evidence of changing or abandoning an approach based on customer feedback or results.
• Experience in automotive, repair, parts, or insurance.
• Familiarity with Rust.

Responsibilities

• Spend time with estimators, parts managers, appraisers, repairers, and suppliers to understand their workflows, constraints, and needs.
• Partner with the Product Manager to shape priorities and solutions using customer insight, technical understanding, and evidence from shipped work.
• Take customer problems through technical design, implementation, and production, making engineering decisions independently and collaborating with product and design as needed.
• Choose appropriate ways to learn, including observation, interviews, manual tests, prototypes, production code, and AI-assisted tools.
• Define success with the Product Manager, instrument solutions, and track adoption, customer value, and production performance.
• Reconcile customer feedback with usage data, investigate conflicting evidence, and change direction when warranted.
• Design trustworthy agentic experiences, balancing useful automation with user control in high-stakes workflows.
• Set strong examples in engineering judgment, customer understanding, and pragmatic delivery.
• Create shared components, tools, or patterns for recurring problems when they make future work faster or more reliable.
• Coach teammates through pairing, thoughtful code reviews, and explanations of technical decisions.
• Share customer insights, technical lessons, and approaches across the team.

Benefits

• Travel and accommodation covered for quarterly Season Openers.
• Relocation cost assistance may be available for employees relocating to join the company.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed