[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer II - AI-Native, Devices Cloud @Life360

Role Description

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Devices Cloud team, you'll build and operate the cloud services that power Life360's connected devices. This role sits at the intersection of hardware, firmware, and mobile — translating real-world device signals into reliable, scalable backend systems.

• Design, build, and maintain backend services for device connectivity, telemetry ingest, health monitoring, and command/control operations — using AI (Claude Code) as a first-class collaborator in your daily development workflow.
• Use agentic workflows to dramatically increase delivery velocity without sacrificing quality: from generating service scaffolding, to writing and validating test coverage, to triage and root cause analysis during incidents.
• Help define and codify AI-native engineering practices for the Devices Cloud team — establishing patterns the broader org can adopt.
• Collaborate with firmware, mobile, and product teams to define APIs and workflows for device-driven features.
• Build and own data pipelines for high-throughput telemetry streams using Kafka or similar streaming technologies.
• Deliver scalable, resilient microservices on AWS (EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, etc.).
• Instrument services for observability, reliability, and SLO compliance.
• Participate in on-call rotation and live incident response.
• Write clean, testable, performant code; contribute to CI/CD automation and improve team-wide engineering standards.
• Mentor teammates and help evolve the team's AI-native engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating high-quality backend services in Java, Go, Python, or similar languages.
• Hands-on experience prompting, evaluating, and building with LLMs — not just autocomplete, but as a genuine development partner.
• Deep experience with agentic workflows, prompt engineering, context window management, and MCP/function calling.
• A track record of using AI tooling to multiply your own output — faster specs, better test coverage, cleaner code, faster debugging.
• Strong experience with microservices architecture, RESTful API design, and distributed systems.
• Solid skills with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), container orchestration, and production deployments.
• Experience with databases (relational and/or NoSQL), caching, and event/streaming systems.
• Ability to collaborate across teams and articulate technical tradeoffs clearly.
• A genuine drive to define what AI-native looks like for complex, hardware-connected systems — you're not waiting for the playbook, you want to write it.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with IoT, telematics, or embedded/hardware-adjacent systems.
• Familiarity with Kafka, Kinesis, or other high-throughput streaming platforms.
• Experience with high-frequency ingest systems and time-series data.
• Background with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, DataDog).
• Knowledge of SRE practices and automated testing frameworks.

AI-Native Expectations

• You use AI coding assistants (we support Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot) for real, substantive tasks: analysis, coding, refactoring, testing, navigating codebases, and documentation. Not just research or autocomplete.
• AI-generated code gets the same review you'd give any PR. You are accountable for everything you ship.
• We expect senior engineers who use AI well to operate with meaningful leverage — doing more with the same time, taking on problems that would otherwise require a larger team.
• You share what works. You automate prompting strategies that others can build on and help teammates earlier in their AI workflow adoption get up to speed.
• The tooling is changing fast. You stay current and bring recommendations to the team when something would meaningfully improve how we work.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (US and Canada)
• 401(k) plan with company matching (US) / RRSP with DPSP matching (Canada)
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental well-being
• Flexible PTO, plus several company-wide days off throughout the year
• Winter and Summer week-long synchronized company shutdowns
• Learning & Development programs
• Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment
• Free Life360 Platinum Membership for your preferred circle
• Free Tile Products