Senior Product Manager for Infrastructure APIs & Developer Ecosystem

Note: Partly is headquartered in the UK, with a Product and Engineering base in Christchurch, and an early presence in San Francisco. If you are not based in Christchurch, we will fly you to HQ for 2 weeks for onboarding, as well as 1 week per quarter for our “Season Openers” (we pay for your travel and accommodation). If you are relocating to Christchurch from NZ or from overseas, we can also assist with relocation costs.

🚀 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 bleeding-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

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 Senior 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

🪅 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
• Free parking. Our Christchurch and Auckland offices include dedicated 24/7 car parks at no cost to you. You can use them during work hours or outside of work, including evenings and weekends