Note: Partly is headquartered in the UK, with a Product and Engineering HQ in Christchurch, New Zealand, and an early presence in San Francisco, USA. If you are based outside of a Hub, we will fly you to the nearest Hub for 1 week per quarter for our “Season Openers” (we pay for your travel and accommodation).

🚀 Our story

Partly's mission is to connect the world's parts and we're doing that by building the first global platform for replacement parts, starting with auto parts. Our big vision is to accelerate the world toward a sustainable future where anyone can fix anything

Founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineers, we utilise cutting-edge technology to solve challenging but exciting problems that make a huge impact in a $1.9 trillion industry. We've more than tripled our team over the last 12 months and expect to double in size again over the coming 12 months. We're a global team spanning both Europe and Australasia.

We provide a scalable digital infrastructure solution to some of the world's largest businesses and the most exciting startups. Partly's solutions are integrated across hundreds of companies globally, providing the backbone for cataloguing and managing parts online.

Our investors in Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp etc.), Square Peg, Octopus Ventures, Icehouse, Peter Beck (Rocket Lab), Akshay Kothari (Notion Co-Founder) and Dylan Field (Figma Co-Founder).

We're continuing to build a world-class team and ensuring Partly is a place where people can do the best work of their lives. We're proud of the culture we've built at Partly, and our values are lived throughout every experience.

🖍️ This role

The Senior ML research engineer will build and ship machine-learning and algorithmic solutions to real problems in the vehicle and parts domain. You’ll report to Abram Spamers and work closely with engineering and product partners to take ambiguous inputs (noisy data, edge cases, shifting constraints) and turn them into measurable, production-grade outcomes.

A core part of this role will be helping us build a foundational model for the vehicle and parts problem space - one that can be adapted across multiple downstream tasks and product surfaces, and that improves over time as we expand data and evaluation. This role is for someone who wants to be judged by what ships: strong baselines, strong evaluation, reliable systems, and improvements that compound over time.

💻 What will you do

• Ship Applied ML solutions end-to-end. Own a problem area from framing through to production rollout, monitoring, and iteration.

• Design evaluation that makes progress undeniable. Build gold datasets, and metrics that reflect real-world performance.

• Blend ML and algorithms pragmatically. Use the right tools: modelling, ranking, classification, retrieval, graph/heuristic methods, LLMs, and domain-specific algorithms where they outperform learning.

• Build for production constraints. Consider latency, scale, failure modes, observability, and safe rollout plans as part of the core deliverable.

• Work across teams to drive adoption. Partner with product and engineering so the solution actually changes outcomes, not just metrics.

• Raise technical standards by example. Reproducible experiments, crisp docs, thoughtful reviews, and clear trade-offs that keep velocity high without breaking reliability.

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

🥷 Your skills

• Proven track record shipping ML into production. You’ve delivered systems used by others, and you understand monitoring, regressions, and operational realities.

• Strong algorithmic thinking. You’re comfortable with classical algorithms and data structures, and know when they beat ML.

• Excellent applied modelling fundamentals. You can build strong baselines, choose sensible methods, and evaluate correctly.

• Evaluation-first mindset. You instinctively build the evaluation framework before you over-invest in complexity, and you can articulate failure modes.

• Engineering-minded execution. You write maintainable code, work effectively with services/pipelines, and care about performance and reliability.

• Clear communicator and collaborator. You can align stakeholders, document trade-offs, and keep delivery moving in a low-bureaucracy environment.

• Experience in messy, weakly-supervised domains. You’ve worked where ground truth is imperfect and success requires clever measurement and iteration.

• (Bonus) Experience with search/ranking/retrieval or graph-based approaches. You’ve built systems that combine multiple signals into reliable outputs.

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!

🪅 Benefits

• High trust, low process and no bureaucracy. We hire exceptional people whose judgment we trust. This means we proactively remove any process or rules that slow us down (for example, our expense policy is simply the “red face test”).

• Competitive base salary + equity. We offer competitive salaries and generous equity options for all full-time employees, ensuring everyone shares in the financial upside when we win.

• Flexible working hours. Choose when to work based on what time you’re most effective (no mandatory or set hours). We combine flexibility with an office-first approach (in cities where we have critical mass, i.e. London, Christchurch, Auckland). ****

• Focus Days. Two days per week, with zero meetings, dedicated solely to uninterrupted deep work

• Take time when you need it. We don’t ask questions or care if people have a negative leave balance. We work extremely hard and trust our team to take the time they need to recharge.

• Offices in Christchurch CBD and on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. We invest heavily in our offices (standing desks, healthy snacks, quality coffee, drinks on tap) to ensure they’re places people are excited by, where they build relationships and get their best work done.

• Learn from the best. Whether it’s during a ‘Lunch n Learn’ or hearing from a unicorn CEO at a Fireside chat, you’ll have the opportunity to constantly learn from the world’s best.

• Quarterly season openers & annual global offsite. Connect regularly at the nearest centralised location for a week of collaboration, big-picture planning and team events.

• Team connection. Monthly team lunches, celebrating our wins, happy hours and more!

• Parental leave and flexible return to work. Do what works for you. Primary carers can return with 4-day weeks (on 100% pay for the first 12 weeks). Secondary carers get 10 days full pay.

• Payroll Giving: We encourage generous giving and donate to the high-impact charities you support