🚀 Our story
Connecting the world's parts
Partly is building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts in a $1.9 trillion industry. Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, backed by Blackbird, Square Peg, and investors from Figma, Notion, and Rocket Lab, we're scaling fast across Europe and Australasia.
Our customers are parts sellers, cataloguers, and marketplace operators. Real people managing millions of SKUs, complex fitment data, and high-stakes purchasing workflows every day. The design challenge here is translating powerful but complex technology into experiences that feel simple, intuitive, and human. Tools that professionals trust and rely on, across wildly different market contexts.
This is not consumer design. This is not a marketing site. This is deep, complex product work where design is the difference between technology that works and technology that people actually want to use.
🖍️ This role
You will own the experience for a complex product area. Your PM owns the product strategy and outcomes. You own how it feels to use. You'll go deep on one of our hardest challenges, whether that's parts cataloguing, search and discovery, buyer workflows, or marketplace experiences, and be the person who ensures the humans using it can do their jobs better, faster, and with less friction.
Concretely, this means you'll be doing things like:
Defining how a parts seller navigates and manages a catalogue of 500,000+ SKUs across multiple vehicle fitment hierarchies. Not just designing a table, but understanding how these people actually work and deciding what the right experience model is
Designing search and discovery experiences where a wrong match has real consequences. A brake pad that doesn't fit a vehicle isn't a bad recommendation, it's a safety issue. You need to deeply understand what confidence and clarity mean to the people using this
Bringing a strong point of view on what the experience should be to your PM and engineering lead. They own the product strategy. You own the user experience. The best outcomes happen when those perspectives push each other
Producing prototypes and high-fidelity designs that hold up in production, not just in Figma. You care about edge cases, states, and the messy reality of real data because real people will encounter all of it
Making hard trade-offs between speed, quality, and technical feasibility. You'll need to understand the codebase and data model well enough to know what's possible, and advocate for the experience that matters most within those constraints
Contributing to our design system and shared patterns so your best experience decisions scale beyond your own product area
Giving direct, specific feedback in critique that makes other designers, PM’s, and engineers work better
You'll work closely with your PM and engineering counterparts in a fast-moving environment where shipping fast matters, perfect is the enemy of good, and the bar for what "good" means is exceptionally high.
💻 What you’ll do
You've owned the user experience for a complex product area and shipped outcomes, not just features. We're looking for designers who can point to a product where they owned how people experienced it for 12+ months. Work where they understood the users deeply, redefined what the experience should be, and delivered measurable results. If your best stories start with "I was given a brief" rather than "I saw how people were struggling and changed the approach," this probably isn't the right fit.
You have strong product and business judgment. You reason from first principles. You can explain why you chose one approach over another, what you traded off, and what you'd do differently in hindsight. You don't optimise for visual polish at the expense of user outcomes.
You're a trusted partner to your PM and engineers. They want you in the room because you make the work better, not because process requires it. You influence decisions through clarity and evidence, not authority.
Your craft is excellent and you know the difference between polish and quality. Your interaction design is precise. Your systems thinking is strong. You obsess over how real people will experience what you build, designing for scale, edge cases, and the messy reality of production. Not just the happy path in a Figma prototype.
You move fast and operate with high autonomy. You don't wait for permission, perfect data, or complete alignment. You make calls, ship, learn, and iterate. You're comfortable being wrong quickly rather than right slowly.
You raise the bar for experience quality through your own work and your feedback. You set a craft standard others learn from. You give constructive, specific critique. You contribute to design systems and shared patterns that make the team's experiences more consistent, more intuitive, and more human.
Your skills and experience
Senior product design experience, typically 6+ years designing complex software products
A portfolio demonstrating strong design fundamentals, polished UI craft, and clear product thinking
Deep fluency in interaction design, UX design, and prototyping to explore, test, and communicate ideas
A genuine curiosity about the people who use what you build. You seek out customer insight through research, observation, and direct conversation
Strong systems thinking and the ability to design solutions that scale beyond a single feature
Clear communication skills, written, verbal, and visual, with the ability to explain design rationale and influence your immediate partners
Proficiency with modern design tools (e.g. Figma) and prototyping workflows
Thoughtful adoption of modern design practices, including AI-assisted design workflows, where they meaningfully improve speed, quality, or leverage
What makes this role hard (and interesting)
The domain is genuinely complex: vehicle fitment, parts taxonomy, and catalogue management are not intuitive problem spaces. You'll need to learn deeply and quickly.
Our customers are professionals, not casual consumers. They have high expectations, low tolerance for friction, and workflows shaped by decades of industry convention.
We're building global infrastructure so our solutions need to work across different markets, languages, and parts standards.
Speed is a core value, not a buzzword. Most decisions are reversible, and a good solution shipped this week beats a perfect one shipped next month.
The team is small and the expectations are high. You'll have enormous ownership and very little cover.
What's valuable but not required
Experience designing workflow-heavy, data-dense, or technically complex B2B products
Experience collaborating closely with research or using quantitative data to validate design decisions
Experience contributing to or evolving design systems
Experience in marketplace, catalogue, e-commerce, or supply chain domains
Experience with SaaS platforms, enterprise software, or developer tools
Experience working in high-growth startup environments
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 relocating within NZ or from abroad, a relocation allowance is offered to support your move to Christchurch.
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