Head of Platform

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

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. You’ll treat platform as an internal product - setting strategy, driving adoption, and partnering closely with engineering and the business to improve delivery speed, uptime, and cost efficiency as we scale.

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/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 (depending on org boundaries) our reliability foundations: observability (metrics/logs/traces), alerting standards, incident response, postmortems, 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.
• 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/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’ll be technical enough to dive in, review designs, unblock incidents, prototype solutions, and set technical standards, while building a team that doesn’t rely on you as the single point of execution.

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/DPDdl

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. You know how to balance reliability, developer productivity, security, and cost.
• SRE & Operations Expertise: Strong grounding in SRE practices (SLOs/error budgets, incident management, observability, capacity planning, resilience engineering) 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. You can design scalable infrastructure, debug systems issues, and make pragmatic build vs buy decisions.
• 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 (not just scripts).
• Developer Experience Mindset: You treat platform as a product: you can define “golden paths,” simplify workflows, drive adoption through empathy and excellent docs, and measure impact (e.g., lead time, deploy frequency, MTTR, change failure rate).
• Security-by-Default: Practical experience embedding security into platforms and SDLC (IAM, secrets, vulnerability management, supply chain hygiene). Bonus if you’ve helped achieve/maintain compliance (SOC2/ISO).
• Strong Engineering Fundamentals: Solid CS and system engineering fundamentals (concurrency, networking, Linux internals, performance profiling, distributed systems, reliability patterns).
• Communication & Influence: Excellent written/verbal communication. You can align senior stakeholders, explain trade-offs to non-specialists, and coach engineers across the org.
• Ownership & Bias for Action: You create clarity in ambiguity, deliver outcomes, and don’t wait to be told what to do. You’re comfortable being accountable for foundational systems.
• 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/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!

Our Benefits

• Healthy, Catered Lunches - Enjoy fresh, healthy lunches every workday in our Auckland, Christchurch, London and San Francisco 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 gym memberships, rock climbing, physio, massage, GP 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 (four days on full pay for your first three months back).
• Getting Here Is On Us - If you commute to a Partly office or co-working space, choose from a paid 24/7 car park or commute 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 a few steps away.
• Office-First with Flexibility - In cities where we have an office (Christchurch, Auckland, London, San Francisco), we default there every day. This let's us move faster, make better decisions and build strong relationships. We also operate with a very high trust environment, so you can manage your time around your life, and flex your schedule to get your best work done.
• 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.

Relocation

• If you are relocating from overseas or domestically to Partly HQ, we offer a generous relocation allowance to support your move