Staff Software Engineer, Ads Engineering

About the role

You will architect and evolve the core ad serving and exchange infrastructure that powers monetization for Life360's global ecosystem. You will design and implement high-availability, low-latency distributed systems in Java, operating at scale within AWS to handle billions of daily events. You will partner with Architecture and Product teams to define technical direction for AdServer and Exchange platforms, ensuring they meet rapidly evolving product and business needs. You will own the full lifecycle of complex features from design through implementation, testing, and production deployment with high reliability. You will leverage AI coding tools as a professional standard to analyze, code, refactor, test, and navigate codebases efficiently. You will share automation and prompting strategies with teammates to elevate the entire team's proficiency and velocity with AI workflows. You will mentor engineers and lead technical decisions while remaining hands-on in delivering robust, scalable backend services. You will ensure systems are resilient, secure, and compliant while enabling seamless integration with third-party ad demand and supply partners.

Key facts

What you'll do

Architect and maintain the AdServer and Exchange platform to support billions of daily events with high availability and low latency.

Design and implement scalable, efficient backend services in Java that process high-volume ad transactions and deliver real-time performance.

Integrate and adapt systems to support new and existing demand and supply partners with resilient, flexible interfaces.

Collaborate closely with cross-functional product and architecture teams to expand advertising capabilities and meet business objectives.

Leverage AWS infrastructure to build horizontally scalable systems that are resilient under heavy load and evolving product demands.

Partner with architecture teams to define long-term technical direction for monetization platforms and guide implementation strategy.

Implement features end-to-end, ensuring reliability, performance, security, and compliance requirements are met for production systems.

Use AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot as professional standards for analysis, coding, refactoring, testing, and navigation of codebases.

Share effective AI prompting strategies and automation practices to help the team operate with greater velocity and leverage.

Lead technical design discussions and mentor engineers to uphold engineering excellence and high-impact delivery.

Drive improvements in system resiliency, scalability, and performance to directly support Life360's global growth and member experience.

Contribute to a culture of curiosity, agency, and engineering excellence within a remote-first, globally distributed team.

Help investigate and resolve complex production issues, ensuring services remain reliable and performant at scale.

Evaluate and adopt new tools and technologies to continuously improve development velocity and system quality.

Participate in on-call rotations to support production services and respond to incidents promptly and effectively.

Requirements

Demonstrate expertise in designing, building, and operating scalable distributed systems that handle high-volume ad transactions.

Have strong proficiency in Java and modern JVM ecosystems, with a deep understanding of concurrency, performance, and reliability.

Bring significant experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS, and infrastructure as code practices for resilient services.

Show mastery of database technologies, including SQL and NoSQL stores, and experience designing data models for high-throughput workloads.

Possess strong knowledge of networking, HTTP protocols, and distributed system patterns such as caching, load balancing, and circuit breakers.

Have a proven track record of writing clean, testable, and maintainable code, with strong skills in debugging complex production issues.

Demonstrate experience working in agile, cross-functional teams, communicating effectively with product managers and stakeholders.

Require a background in building or operating systems that integrate with third-party APIs and partners at scale.

Require the ability to interpret technical requirements and translate them into robust, scalable backend implementations.

Require a commitment to writing high-quality code, performing thorough code reviews, and contributing to architectural decisions.

Nice to have

Experience with large-scale event-driven architectures and streaming platforms such as Kafka.

Background in real-time bidding or ad technology platforms and related ecosystems.

Knowledge of containerization and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes.

Experience with monitoring, observability, and alerting tools to maintain high-availability systems.

Familiarity with DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines for rapid, reliable deployments.

Experience contributing to open source projects or publishing reusable libraries and tools.

Practical notes

This is a remote-first role; all positions can be performed remotely within the US and Canada regardless of listed location.

Employees are expected to work full-time during standard business hours, with flexibility for asynchronous work.

Travel is not required for this role.

This role is eligible for US and Canadian residents only due to legal and tax considerations.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the country they will be employed in without sponsorship.