Senior Software Engineer II

About the role

Life360 is seeking a backend engineer who integrates AI into their core development process. You will play a key role in building and enhancing our experimentation and machine learning infrastructure, contributing to services that personalize user experiences. This position involves shaping the future of AI-assisted development within our engineering organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Develop and deploy high-quality APIs and services for our experimentation and personalization systems.
• Utilize AI coding assistants as a primary development tool, orchestrating agents for tasks like specification creation, code generation, testing, and review.
• Define and document AI-native engineering practices for the team, creating playbooks for broader adoption.
• Contribute to the backend technology stack, delivering performant and reliable features to millions of users.
• Partner with product and data teams to translate complex user needs into scalable engineering solutions.
• Participate in architectural discussions, code reviews, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Engage in on-call duties and incident response.
• Employ agentic workflows to enhance delivery speed and quality.
• Mentor team members and contribute to team processes and technical standards.
• Ensure the performance, reliability, and accessibility of owned features.

Requirements

• A minimum of 6 years of experience in backend software engineering.
• Strong command of Java and Spring Boot.
• Experience with distributed streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka.
• A thorough understanding of distributed systems principles, including consistency, fault tolerance, and replication.
• Familiarity with cloud environments, particularly AWS, and containerized deployments.
• Extensive experience using AI-native workflows, understanding the research-plan-implement cycle without relying solely on AI for critical thinking.
• At least 1 year of practical experience prompting, evaluating, and building with large language models.
• A growth mindset with the ability to precisely structure problems, learn rapidly, and embrace new challenges.
• A collaborative approach, communicating effectively across teams and valuing diverse perspectives.
• An ownership mentality, taking responsibility for work from conception through production.
• An AI-native working style, using AI tools as a development partner for task delegation, critical output review, and parallel workstream management.
• Thoughtful communication skills, capable of explaining technical trade-offs and articulating ideas clearly.

Nice to have

• Experience developing or managing experimentation platforms, A/B testing systems, or feature flagging tools.
• Background in supporting recommendation, personalization, or machine learning serving systems, including feature stores, data pipelines, and low-latency model serving.
• Experience with stream processing frameworks like Kafka Streams or Flink.
• Knowledge of schema registries and schema evolution strategies.
• Familiarity with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud.
• Understanding of CI/CD practices, GitHub Actions, and artifact management tools like Maven or Nexus.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or DataDog.
• Prior work on ecosystem or integration tooling.

Skills & tools

• Java
• Spring Boot
• Apache Kafka
• AWS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Claude Code (or similar AI coding assistants)

Practical notes

• For US-based candidates, the salary range is $118,500 to $216,500 USD.
• For Canada-based candidates, the salary range is $171,500 to $201,000 CAD. (Note: The job title in Canada will be "Developer".)
• Compensation is determined by factors including background, experience, geographic location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
• The compensation package includes medical, dental, vision, financial benefits, and equity.
• Life360 offers a comprehensive benefits package including 100% paid medical, dental, and vision for US employees, and supplemental plans for Canadian employees.
• Retirement plans include 401(k) with company match in the US and RRSP with DPSP in Canada.
• Employee Assistance Program for mental wellness.
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) and 12 company-wide paid holidays.
• Two week-long company shutdowns annually (winter and summer).
• Learning and Development programs.
• Support for remote work setup, including equipment and reimbursement.
• Complimentary Life360 Platinum Membership and free Tile products.
• Life360 is a remote-first company. All positions can be performed remotely within the US and Canada.
• Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.