Head of Platform

About Partly

Partly is an innovative company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global offices including locations in Auckland, New Zealand. The company is pioneering the AI infrastructure layer in the global repair industry, focusing initially on the $2 trillion automotive sector. Their flagship AI model, Interpreter, specializes in vehicle damage assessment and parts identification, serving thousands of businesses worldwide. Founded by former Rocket Lab engineers, Partly has grown rapidly, recently securing a $50 million Series B funding round led by prominent investors. The company values a high-performance culture where employees can thrive.

Role Overview

The Head of Platform will spearhead the development and leadership of Partly's foundational technology layers, including internal platforms, infrastructure, reliability initiatives, and security practices. This role supports the engineering teams to accelerate delivery with stability and cost efficiency, extending from foundational ML/AI infrastructure (like GPU compute and model serving) to enabling agentic development capabilities especially for regionally embedded and forward-deployed engineers. The position involves strategic ownership of the platform as an internal product, partnering across engineering and business to drive impactful outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and expand the Platform division, encompassing SRE, developer experience, infrastructure, and security enablement, setting strategic roadmaps and managing team priorities.
• Design and implement developer workflows including service templates, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning, feature flags, and configuration management, focusing on increasing developer productivity and platform adoption.
• Oversee reliability foundations such as observability frameworks, alerting, incident response, postmortems, SLO and error budget management, disaster recovery, and minimizing on-call burdens.
• Build scalable, secure cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tools (Terraform, ArgoCD, Python/Bash) to ensure repeatable and auditable environments.
• Develop and manage ML and foundational AI model infrastructure, including accelerator provisioning, training orchestration, model serving, and cost-optimized inference management.
• Establish a platform that natively supports AI agent-driven development with self-service, secure, and observability-rich environments to enable fast delivery by both AI agents and distributed engineering teams.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed security-by-default throughout platform and development practices, including IAM, secrets management, vulnerability monitoring, and policy automation.
• Track and optimize cost and performance metrics with FinOps principles, improving economics without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity.
• Partner with cross-functional leadership and engineering teams to address bottlenecks, influence architecture, and ensure platform initiatives deliver real business value.
• Maintain hands-on technical involvement, including reviewing designs, resolving incidents, prototyping solutions, and setting technical standards, while cultivating a capable team not solely reliant on individual expertise.

Essential Qualifications and Skills

• Proven experience managing platform, infrastructure, or SRE teams with accountability for roadmaps, stakeholder engagement, and team growth in dynamic environments.
• Deep knowledge of SRE methodologies including SLOs, error budgets, incident handling, observability, capacity planning, and resilience improvements.
• Expertise in cloud platforms (preferably Google Cloud Platform) and Kubernetes for production-grade scalable infrastructure design and troubleshooting.
• Hands-on proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps workflows such as Terraform and ArgoCD, coupled with solid software engineering skills for automation tooling.
• A developer experience mindset treating the platform as a product, capable of defining simplified and effective workflows ('golden paths') and measuring impact through metrics like lead time and deploy frequency.
• Practical experience integrating security into platform infrastructure and software development lifecycles, including identity management, secrets, vulnerability mitigation, and compliance frameworks (SOC2/ISO considered a plus).
• Strong computer science fundamentals encompassing concurrency, networking, Linux internals, performance tuning, distributed systems, and reliability engineering patterns.
• Familiarity with AI and ML infrastructure layers including accelerator management, training orchestration, model serving, MLOps tooling, and cost-performance trade-offs in production AI environments.
• Innovative thinking geared towards enabling AI agent-centric platforms with self-service and embedded safety controls, supporting distributed engineering teams for rapid feature delivery.
• Excellent communication, influential stakeholder management, and coaching abilities to align technical teams and leadership.
• A proactive approach with accountability for delivering clear outcomes amidst ambiguity, and ownership of critical foundational systems.

Additional Experience and Bonus Attributes

• Experience scaling platform engineering capabilities during phases of rapid organizational growth.
• Familiarity with Partly's technology stack such as GCP, ArgoCD, GitLab CI, Kafka, and Postgres.
• Background in developing internal developer platforms, shared service frameworks, or multi-tenant platform architectures.

Inclusive Application Encouragement

Applicants who may not meet every requirement but can demonstrate exceptional potential are encouraged to apply, particularly individuals from underrepresented or marginalized groups.

Employee Benefits and Perks

• Empowered culture with minimal bureaucracy enabling exceptional judgment-driven autonomy, including flexible expense policies.
• Competitive salaries paired with equity options to share in the company’s growth and success.
• Flexible work hours to accommodate individual productivity peaks combined with an office-first presence in key locations (London, Christchurch, Auckland).
• Dedicated Focus Days twice weekly, free from meetings to support deep concentration work.
• Generous leave policies allowing employees to take necessary time off without scrutiny or negative consequences.
• Premium office environments featuring ergonomic setups, healthy snacks, quality coffee, and social spaces fostering collaboration and strong team bonds.
• Opportunities for continuous learning from top industry leaders through events such as Lunch & Learns and fireside chats.
• Regular team-building events, including quarterly global meetups and monthly social gatherings.
• Parental support with flexible return-to-work arrangements offering reduced hours at full pay for primary carers and paid leave for secondary carers.
• Payroll giving program encouraging charitable contributions aligned with employee interests.

Relocation Assistance

Partly provides a substantial relocation package for candidates moving domestically or internationally to join the headquarters, ensuring a smooth transition.