Staff Backend Engineer (AI Native), Family AI Lab at Life360

About Life360 Life360’s mission is to keep people close to the ones they love. Our category-leading mobile app,Tile tracking devices, and Pet GPS tracker empower members to protect the people, pets, and things they care about most with a range of services, including location sharing, safe driver reports, and crash detection with emergency dispatch. Life360 serves approximately 95.8 million monthly active users (MAU), as of December 31, 2025, across more than 180 countries. Life360 delivers peace of mind and enhances everyday family life with seamless coordination for all the moments that matter, big and small. By continuing to innovate and deliver for our customers, we have become a household name and the must-have mobile-based membership for families (and those friends who are basically family). Life360 has more than 500 (and growing!) remote-first employees. For more information, please visit life360.com. Life360 is a Remote First company, which means a remote work environment will be the primary experience for all employees. All positions, unless otherwise specified, can be performed remotely (within the US and Canada) regardless of any specified location above. We are AI Native We are building an AI native company where AI is an integral part of how we build and operate. AI tool usage during interviews varies by role. You may be asked to demonstrate proficiency with AI tools, discuss how you leverage AI, or complete interview exercises without AI assistance. Your Recruiter will provide clear guidance as you move through the interview process. Undisclosed use of AI not previously discussed with or approved by your Recruiter may impact your candidacy. About The Team The AI Lab is a small, founder-led team operating like a zero-to-one startup inside Life360, building the company’s next chapter. Our mission is to transform Life360 from the app you open to find your family into an intelligent operating system families rely on daily. We design and build an AI-powered layer on top of our family graph, leveraging our core location technologies and global 100 million-user base to proactively surface what matters across location, schedules, and everyday life. About the Job Your role is owning how Life360's deterministic backend (location data, the family graph, behavioral signals, user insights) pairs with the probabilistic world of LLMs. You decide how those two sides talk to each other, and you make sure the seams don't show. You own the inference pipeline end to end: model selection, serving infrastructure, evaluation loops, prompt and context strategy, and the cloud services that keep it all running in production. You make the tradeoffs between latency, cost, and quality. You build the eval harness that tells us whether the system is actually getting better, not just feeling different. If you do this job right, the product feels seamless to users, the data stays safe, and inference costs don't run away from us. You are a cloud engineer who is deeply fluent in how AI systems actually work in production. For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $190,000 to $280,000 USD. For candidates based out of Canada, the salary range for this position is $220,000 to $260,000 CAD. Note: Please be aware that the job title for positions in Canada will be "Developer" in lieu of "Engineer." We take into consideration an individual's background and experience in determining final salary - therefore, base pay offered may vary considerably depending on geographic location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The compensation package includes a wide range of medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits, as well as equity. What You’ll Do • Architect the inference pipeline that turns Life360 into a context layer LLMs can reason over: soul files, family context, behavioral signals, document understanding. • Choose models. Choose hosting. Decide what is self-hosted, API-based, fine-tuned, or prompt-engineered. Revisit those decisions as the landscape changes. • Build the serving infrastructure. Latency budgets, batching, caching, fallbacks, graceful degradation. Make it run at scale before scale gets here. • Build the eval loop. Know whether changes make the product better or worse, not just whether the demo works. This is the difference between a real product and a magic trick. • Own the cost model. Track spend per user, per feature, per family. Find the levers (context compression, model routing, pre-computation) that keep unit economics working from a test group to millions. • Define what gets persisted, what gets summarized, and what gets thrown away. The architecture decision of "what does our data look like to an LLM" lives with you. • Set the bar for safety, privacy, and trust at the infrastructure layer. Sensitive categories filtered before they propagate. Encryption, access controls, audit trails built in, not bolted on. What We’re Looking For If there's one trait we need above all others, it's self-starter energy. As we've gotten bigger, we've been more open to roles with clearly defined schedules and processes. That doesn't work in a startup. We need people on founder hours, not office hours — with a huge desire to win. You'll be a cofounder of this initiative. • You operate without a spec. You'd rather have a conversation, a sketch, and 24 hours than a 30-page PRD and a week. • You ship every day. Not "make progress." Ship. Even rough. Even ugly. Momentum matters more than polish at this stage. • You push for more. You won't wait to be told what to do. You demand excellence of yourself and the people around you. • You hold strong opinions and change them when the evidence moves. You push back. You concede fast when wrong. • You're a customer of what we build. Try it if you haven't. The bar • Deep engineering experience, with significant time spent building and running AI systems in production at meaningful scale. Real users, real load, real on-call. • Fluent in modern LLM serving (vLLM, TGI, SGLang, hosted APIs — whatever's right for the job). No religion about it. • You think in evals. You've built harnesses. You know the difference between vibes-based iteration and real progress because you've felt the pain of not having one. • You can build a cloud system from the ground up. Pick the services, wire them together, make them reliable, keep the bill in check. • Strong opinions about cost. You've seen inference bills run out of control and have instincts for where the leaks come from. • AI-native in your daily workflow. Hands-on with Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent. You think natively in agentic workflows, prompt engineering, context window management, MCP / function calling. • Comfortable deciding with incomplete information. The spec will be a moving target. You don't need it to settle before you start building. • Strong written communication. You write specs, decision records, and playbooks that an agent (and a human) can act on precisely. • Experience with agent systems, retrieval pipelines, or long-context personalization. • Privacy architecture experience in multi-user systems where context is shared across people with different rights to see it. • You've built something where the data itself was the moat — and you understand why that's different from building on public data. Our Benefits • Competitive pay and benefits. • Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees). We offer supplemental plans for medical and dental for Canadian employees. • 401(k) plan with company matching program in the US and RRSP with DPSP plan for Canadian employees. • Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental wellness. • Flexible PTO and 12 company wide days off throughout the year. • Learning & Development programs. • Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment. • Free Life360 Platinum Membership for your preferred circle. Life360 Values Our company’s mission driven culture is guided by our shared values to create a trusted work environment where you can bring your authentic self to work and make a positive difference • Be a Good Person - We have a team of high integrity people you can trust. • Be Direct With Respect - We communicate directly, even when it’s hard. • Members Before Metrics - We focus on building an exceptional experience for families. • High Intensity High Impact - We do whatever it takes to get the job done. Our Commitment to Diversity We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Life360. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any legally protected status. We encourage people of all backgrounds to apply. We believe that a diversity of perspectives and experiences create a foundation for the best ideas. Come join us in building something meaningful. Even if you don’t meet 100% of the below qualifications, you should still seriously consider applying! #LI-Remote ____________________________________________________________________________