Head of Platform

Our story Partly's mission is to connect the world's parts and we are 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 waste is eliminated, and all replacement parts are universally searchable, accessible, and available to all. 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 have more than tripled our team over the last 12 months and expect to double in size again over the coming 12 months. We are 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 include Blackbird Ventures (Canva, CultureAmp), 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 are proud of the culture we have built at Partly, and our values are lived throughout every experience. Head of Platform is responsible for building and leading the team that provides Partly’s foundation for shipping and operating software: the internal platform, infrastructure foundations, reliability practices, and security‑by‑default capabilities that let product teams move fast without breaking things. This role now extends in two directions: the specialised infrastructure behind Partly's foundational ML/AI capabilities (GPU compute, model training and serving, inference cost), and a platform that natively supports agentic development so regionally‑embedded product engineers can move exceptionally fast. What will you do: Platform Strategy & Team Leadership: Build and lead the Platform function (SRE, DevEx, Infrastructure, Security enablement as appropriate). Set a clear roadmap, establish ways of working, hire and grow the team, and manage prioritisation and trade‑offs. Developer Experience: Create the default path for engineers to build, test, deploy, and operate services (service templates, CI/CD, environment provisioning, secrets/config, deployment patterns, feature flags). Focus on adoption and measurable improvements in developer productivity. Reliability & Operational Excellence: Own or drive our reliability foundations: observability, alerting standards, incident response, post‑mortems, SLO/error budget practices, rollout/rollback patterns, backups/DR, and reducing on‑call toil. Infrastructure Foundations: Ensure our cloud and Kubernetes foundations are scalable, secure, and maintainable. Use Infrastructure‑as‑Code and automation (Terraform for GCP, GitOps with ArgoCD, Python/Bash tooling, etc.) to run repeatable, auditable infrastructure. ML & Foundation‑Model Infrastructure: Build the platform beneath Partly's foundational models — accelerator provisioning, scheduling and utilisation, training/fine‑tuning orchestration, and scalable, low‑latency model serving. Own the ML deployment lifecycle and treat inference economics as a first‑class cost driver. Agentic & Forward‑Deployed Enablement: Make the platform natively support agentic development. Design golden paths that are self‑service and machine‑consumable so AI coding agents and engineers alike can go from generated code to production without the platform team as a bottleneck. Security Enablement: Partner with security/compliance to make secure‑by‑default the easiest path (IAM patterns, secrets management, vulnerability management, policy‑as‑code where appropriate, audit evidence automation). Cost & Performance Ownership: Establish FinOps‑style visibility and guardrails, track cost drivers, and deliver optimisations that improve unit economics without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity. Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product and Engineering leadership and stream‑aligned teams to understand bottlenecks, influence architectural direction, and ensure platform work translates into real outcomes for customers and the business. Hands‑on Delivery (especially early): You will be technical enough to dive in, review designs, unblock incidents, prototype solutions, and set technical standards while building a team that does not rely on you as the single point of execution. Want to learn more about the problems we are solving and the culture we are building at Partly? Hear directly from our team here: https://shorturl.at/iAFUX Your skills: Platform Leadership: Proven experience leading a platform / infrastructure / SRE function, including roadmap ownership, stakeholder management, and building teams in a fast‑moving environment. SRE & Operations Expertise: Strong grounding in SRE practices and a track record of improving uptime and reducing operational toil. Cloud & Kubernetes Depth: Deep familiarity with running production workloads on a major cloud (GCP preferred) and Kubernetes. Infrastructure‑as‑Code & Automation: Hands‑on expertise with IaC and GitOps workflows (Terraform, ArgoCD or equivalent) and the software engineering ability to build robust tooling. Developer Experience Mindset: Treat platform as a product: define golden paths, simplify workflows, drive adoption through empathy and excellent docs, and measure impact. Security‑by‑Default: Practical experience embedding security into platforms and SDLC. Bonus if you have helped achieve or maintain compliance (SOC2/ISO). Strong Engineering Fundamentals: Solid CS and system engineering fundamentals (concurrency, networking, Linux internals, performance profiling, distributed systems, reliability patterns). ML/AI Infrastructure Depth: Familiarity with the AI infrastructure stack, GPU acceleration, model serving, MLOps, and cost/performance trade‑offs of running models in production. Agentic‑Native Platform Thinking: Design platforms for a world where AI agents are first‑class users—machine‑consumable golden paths, safe autonomous execution, and self‑service that scales to higher workload volume. Communication & Influence: Excellent written and verbal communication, ability to align senior stakeholders and explain trade‑offs to non‑specialists. Ownership & Bias for Action: Create clarity in ambiguity, deliver outcomes, and take initiative. Bonus Points: Experience scaling platform practices through rapid growth (multiple teams/services). Familiarity with our stack (GCP, ArgoCD, GitLab CI, Kafka, Postgres). Experience building internal developer platforms, service frameworks, or multi‑tenant platform capabilities. 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 folks, especially those from underrepresented or marginalised groups, often think they do not belong. Let us learn more about you and why you are 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. Competitive base salary and equity. We offer competitive salaries and generous equity options for all full‑time employees. Flexible working hours . Choose when to work based on when you are most effective. We combine flexibility with an office‑first approach in cities where we have critical mass. Focus Days. Two days per week with zero meetings, dedicated solely to uninterrupted deep work. Take time when you need it. We do not ask questions about leave balances and encourage employees to recharge when required. Offices in Christchurch CBD and on Auckland’s Drake Street with standing desks, healthy snacks, quality coffee, and drinks on tap. Learn from the best. Opportunities like “Lunch n Learn” or talks from CEO speakers. Quarterly season openers and annual global offsite for collaboration and team events. Team connection. Monthly team lunches , celebrating wins and engaging in social events. Parental leave and flexible return to work . Primary carers can return with 4‑day weeks on full pay for the first 12 weeks; secondary carers receive 10 days full pay. Payroll Giving: We encourage generous giving and donate to the high‑impact charities you support. Relocation If you are relocating from overseas or domestically to Partly HQ, we offer a generous relocation allowance to support your move. #J-18808-Ljbffr