Staff Software Engineer, Ads Engineering

About the role

Join Life360 to architect and develop the next generation of our backend systems supporting global growth. You will contribute to scaling and modernizing our high-volume AdServer and Exchange platform, a critical distributed system handling billions of requests daily. This role involves hands-on technical leadership and guiding architectural evolution to power monetization across our ecosystem.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead the technical direction for Life360's Ads AdServer and Exchange platform, ensuring it scales to manage over 20 billion daily events with strict performance requirements.
• Make architectural choices that enhance system resilience, fault tolerance, and performance across distributed environments.
• Set high standards for design quality, scalability, observability, and operational excellence within the engineering team.
• Drive revenue increases by integrating new advertising partners and improving real-time bidding capabilities.
• Collaborate with Product and Design teams to introduce new advertising formats and platform features that create monetization opportunities.
• Proactively identify and address potential scaling issues before they impact users or business performance.
• Manage complex technical projects from inception to completion, aligning multiple teams towards shared architectural goals.
• Enhance automation and quality assurance, including AI-assisted API validation and testing, to boost development speed while maintaining stability.
• Improve platform reliability through enhanced monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis processes.
• Mentor other senior engineers and act as a catalyst to increase the team's overall technical capability and effectiveness.

Requirements

• Hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Possess 8 or more years of experience with deep expertise in Java and designing multi-threaded systems, with a proven ability to optimize for performance under high concurrency.
• Have experience working with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) for analysis, coding, refactoring, testing, and documentation.
• Demonstrate experience in architecting and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems at scale.
• Show success in scaling systems across multiple data centers, including replication strategies and distributed data management.
• Exhibit strong judgment in balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architectural health.
• Possess the ability to influence technical strategy across different teams without direct reporting lines.
• Have a history of translating business goals, particularly in advertising or monetization, into scalable technical solutions.
• Possess solid database knowledge, understanding data consistency, performance trade-offs, and capacity planning.
• Have experience operating within cloud-native environments, preferably AWS.
• Be comfortable understanding the entire client interaction flow and its connection to various business components.
• Communicate effectively to align engineering, product, and business stakeholders on shared objectives.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with AdTech ecosystems, including advertiser technologies or Real-Time Bidding frameworks.
• Experience integrating third-party demand and supply partners.

Skills & tools

• Java
• AWS
• Claude Code
• Cursor
• GitHub Copilot

Practical notes

• For US-based candidates, the salary range is $152,000 to $280,500 USD. For Canadian-based candidates, the salary range is $220,000 to $260,000 CAD. Note: Canadian positions will use the title "Developer." Final salary is determined by background, experience, location, and other factors.
• Compensation includes medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits, plus equity.
• Life360 is a remote-first company, with this role open to candidates in the US and Canada.
• Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
• Travel is not expected.
• Benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, 401(k) with company match (US) or RRSP with DPSP (Canada), Employee Assistance Program, flexible PTO, and learning and development programs.
• Application deadline: Not specified.