Head of Platform

📋 Description

• • We are Partly, a company on a mission to connect the world's parts and accelerate the world towards 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 provide a scalable digital infrastructure solution to some of the world's largest businesses and the most exciting startups.
• • Our solutions are integrated across hundreds of companies globally, providing the backbone for cataloguing and managing parts online.
• • 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.
• • The 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 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 (including forward-deployed engineers) can move exceptionally fast.
• • 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.
• • Platform Strategy & Team Leadership: Build and lead the Platform function (SRE, DevEx, Infrastructure, Security enablement as appropriate).
• • 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).
• • 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.
• • ML & Foundation-Model Infrastructure: Build the platform beneath Partly's foundational models — accelerator (GPU/TPU) provisioning, scheduling and utilisation, training/fine-tuning orchestration, and scalable, low-latency model serving.
• • Agentic & Forward-Deployed Enablement: Make the platform natively support agentic development.
• • Security Enablement: Partner with security/compliance to make secure-by-default the easiest path.
• • 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.
• • 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 (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.
• • 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).
• • 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/accelerator compute, training/fine-tuning orchestration, inference and model serving, MLOps (registries, experiment tracking, evals), and the cost/performance trade-offs of running models in production.
• • Agentic-Native Platform Thinking: You design platforms for a world where AI agents are first-class users, not just humans — machine-consumable golden paths, safe autonomous execution, and self-service that scales to far higher workload volume.
• • Communication & Influence: Excellent written/verbal communication.
• • Ownership & Bias for Action: You create clarity in ambiguity, deliver outcomes, and don’t wait to be told what to do.
• • 🪅 BENEFITS
• • High trust, low process and no bureaucracy.
• • Competitive base salary + equity.
• • Flexible working hours.
• • Focus Days.
• • Take time when you need it.
• • Offices in Christchurch CBD and on Auckland’s Drake Street.
• • Learn from the best.
• • Quarterly season openers & annual global offsite.
• • Team connection.
• • Parental leave and flexible return to work.
• • Payroll Giving.