Senior/Staff Product Manager, NZ, Infrastructure APIs & Developer Ecosystem

Job description

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 connecting the world's parts, and we're doing that by building the AI infrastructure layer for the global repair industry, starting with the $2tn automotive market. Our frontier model, Interpreter, is the world's first AI purpose-built to understand vehicle damage and the parts needed to fix it. Thousands of businesses across the global repair supply chain already rely on it. Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we've tripled in size in the last 18 months and have recently raised a $50m Series B led by DST Global (Anthropic, Airbnb, Meta, TikTok, Spotify) and including Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), WNDR, Activant Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Square Peg, Airtree, and Ecliptic Venture Capital. We're headquartered in Austin, with offices in New Zealand and London. We're continuing to build a world-class team ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built, and our values are lived throughout every experience. 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/iAFUX 🖍️ THIS ROLE Partly is building the AI infrastructure layer for the global automotive parts industry. At the core of that infrastructure is Partly Rails - the transactional backbone that orchestrates the full job lifecycle, from estimation through procurement, reconciliation, and close. It is the layer everything else runs on. As Principal or Staff PM for Infrastructure APIs & Developer Ecosystem, you own the product that makes Partly's infrastructure accessible to the world. That means owning Rails as an end-to-end transactional product in its own right, building the external API program that lets customers and third-party systems integrate with confidence, and growing the developer ecosystem that compounds Partly's reach across markets without requiring direct Partly involvement in every integration. This is a platform product role with two connected mandates: keeping the core job flow principled, auditable, and scalable; and building the external developer program - portal, documentation, partner ecosystem, and agentic API evolution - that turns Partly's infrastructure into a platform others build on. You'll be operating at an inflection point. AI-assisted development and agents are compressing product discovery and delivery cycles. The best PMs we know are no longer waiting for engineering capacity to test an idea - they're building rapid prototypes themselves, deploying them, reading the signal, and deciding within days. We're looking for someone already working that way, or actively building toward it. 💻 WHAT YOU'LL OWN - Partly Rails. The end-to-end transactional job flow - from job creation through estimation, procurement, reconciliation, and close. You own this as a product: opinionated in design, reliable at scale, and compelling as a value proposition for any system that runs on it. Key metrics: API feature coverage of the job flow, jobs processed on Rails APIs, uptime, latency, error rates. - External Integration APIs. The full external API program - API governance, versioning policy, and the standards that define how the outside world connects to Partly. Key metrics: API adoption rate, integration depth, versioning health. - Developer Portal & Experience. The developer platform - documentation, tooling, sandbox environments, and everything a third-party integrator needs to go from first call to production. Key metrics: time to first test job, time to first production job, developer satisfaction. - Developer Ecosystem. The global network of integration partners building on Partly's infrastructure - identifying them, activating them, and creating the conditions for the ecosystem to grow. Key metrics: active external integrations, ecosystem growth rate, partner retention. - Agentic API Evolution. As AI agents become a new class of API consumer alongside traditional system integrations, you own evolving Partly's API offer to serve them - designing for autonomous, context-aware, and reliable agentic usage patterns. Key metrics: agentic integration adoption, reliability under autonomous consumption. 💻 WHAT YOU'LL DO Own your product, end-to-end - Define and evolve the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for Partly's infrastructure and developer platform. - Own the metrics that reflect the health of the Rails transaction layer and the growth of the developer ecosystem - and use them to steer all decisions. - Lead go-to-market alignment for API releases, ecosystem programs, and integration partnerships. - Act as the single accountable owner - for successes, failures, and everything in between. Stay close to customers - Maintain direct, regular contact with integration partners and developers - not as an escalation path, but as a core weekly input to prioritisation. - Understand the difference between what developers ask for and what they actually need to ship successfully. - Combine qualitative developer feedback with API usage data, integration telemetry, and support signals - and reconcile them. Build and ship, not just specify - Prototype API experiences, documentation flows, and developer tooling yourself using AI-assisted development - fast and disposable. - Treat the prototype as the hypothesis. Test with real integrators before writing the spec. - Work hands-on with data: define metrics, build dashboards, query logs, read the signals directly. Lead in the human loop - Partner closely with engineering leads to balance platform capability, developer experience, and technical sustainability. - Align partner success, GTM, and support teams around the ecosystem strategy. - Communicate API roadmap and deprecation decisions clearly and early - external developers depend on stability and deserve advance notice. Lead in the agent loop - Design APIs and instrumentation with agentic consumption in mind - not as a future consideration, but as a present design constraint. - Define what "working" means for agent-consumed APIs: reliability, observability, graceful failure, and context fidelity. - Think in systems: how does a change to the API surface propagate through every integration downstream? Raise the bar - Set the standard for API design, documentation quality, and developer experience across Partly. - Help define what an excellent external developer program looks like as the ecosystem scales. 🥷 WHAT YOU BRING Non-negotiables - Proven experience owning developer-facing API products: API design, versioning, governance, and lifecycle management. - Practical experience building or scaling a developer ecosystem - partner programs, integration networks, or developer communities. - Deep understanding of developer experience as a product discipline: what good onboarding, documentation, and tooling actually look like at each stage of maturity. - Commercial and technical depth - you can engage credibly with engineers on API architecture and translate developer needs into clear business outcomes. - 5+ years owning platform or infrastructure products with clear accountability for adoption metrics, not just delivery. - You build rapid prototypes yourself - with AI-assisted tools, LLM-assisted development, or code - as a first instinct for testing ideas. - Strong analytical instinct: you define the metrics, build the view, read the data, and act on it - without waiting for a data team to hand it to you. Strong signals we look for - Experience designing APIs for agentic or LLM-based consumption, beyond traditional system integrations. - Familiarity with transactional or workflow APIs in domains such as payments, logistics, supply chain, or insurance. - Experience running a partner or ISV program at scale. - Comfort owning reliability, observability, and non-functional requirements as first-class product concerns. - Founder background, or early employee at a platform-first startup that scaled materially. - You've killed or radically changed something you personally believed in, and can explain why. Bonus - Domain knowledge in automotive aftermarket, collision repair, or insurance claims. - Experience scaling developer platforms across multiple geographies. - Experience with product-led growth motions applied to a developer or API product. - Experience building or operating products with meaningful agentic or automation components. 🧭 HOW YOU'LL THINK AND OPERATE We're not looking for framework experts or consensus-drivers. We're looking for someone who thinks like this: - "I shipped a sandbox version of the new flow yesterday. Two integration partners have already tried it. Here's what they got stuck on." - "The p99 latency spike on job creation is the highest-priority issue this week — not the feature request in the backlog." - "Here's what the integration telemetry shows. Here's what I think it means. Here's what I'm changing. Here's when I'll know if I'm wrong." - "An agent just tried to consume this API autonomously and failed in a way we didn't design for. That's the most interesting problem we have right now." Speed, ownership, and judgment are the baseline. What differentiates the best candidates is the ability to operate fluently across both the developer-facing surface - documentation, DX, partner programs - and the infrastructure layer beneath it, and to shrink the distance between intent and outcome. 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 - Healthy, Catered Lunches - Enjoy fresh, healthy lunches every workday in our Auckland, Christchurch, London, and Austin 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 as gym memberships, rock climbing, physical therapy, massage, doctor 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 plan (four days a week at full pay for your first three months back). - Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or coworking space, choose from a paid 24/7 parking spot or a commuting 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 just a few steps away. - Office-First with Flexibility - In cities where we have an office (Christchurch, Auckland, London, and Austin), we default to working from the office every day. This lets us move faster, make better decisions, and build strong relationships. We also operate with a high-trust environment, so you can manage your time around your life and flex your schedule to do your best work. - 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.