Senior Software Engineer II AI-Native, Messaging

About Life360

Life360's mission is to keep people close to the ones they love. Our category-leading mobile app and Tile tracking devices 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 91.6 million monthly active users (MAU), as of September 30, 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 that basically are 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.

About the Team

The Messaging team owns the backbone of Life360's real-time infrastructure — the event streaming and data pipelines that keep millions of families connected. We process billions of events every day across location updates, safety alerts, and the push notifications that make the product feel instant.

We are a small, platform-focused, AI-native team. AI isn't a productivity add-on here — it's how we work. Every engineer on the team directs AI agents as a core part of their daily loop: scaffolding services, drafting Terraform, exploring unfamiliar codebases, writing migration scripts, and reviewing diffs. We move faster and go deeper on hard distributed systems problems because we've built the habits, prompts, and guardrails to make agentic work reliable.

Current initiatives include the MSK-to-Confluent Cloud migration, organization-wide schema registry and Protobuf governance, and the next generation of Life360's streaming services. Our stack is Kafka and Kafka Streams, Spring Boot (Java 21), Go, Protobuf/gRPC, Terraform, and AWS.

About the Job

This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who has already made AI a first-class collaborator in their work. You'll design streaming services, write and review code, own production incidents, and ship infrastructure — and you'll do all of it with agents running in parallel alongside you. We're looking for an engineer who already decomposes work into agentic workflows, critiques agent output with real technical authority, and ships production code faster because of it.

You'll help shape the team's technical direction on Kafka-first streaming infrastructure and the next phase of our high-availability roadmap. You'll also help evolve how the team itself works with AI — the prompts, the evals, the review patterns, the escape hatches when agents go sideways.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate streaming services on Kafka, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud Stream — directing agents to scaffold, test, and iterate, and owning the outcome end-to-end.
• Develop and manage Kafka connectors for data integration (DynamoDB, S3, NSQ, custom sinks/sources) and the SMT chains that keep them honest.
• Own schema management and evolution across Protobuf, Schema Registry, and multi-language code generation — including the Gradle/Nexus publishing pipelines that back it.
• Drive platform migrations (MSK → Confluent Cloud, NSQ → Kafka) including dual-cluster consumer patterns, VPC peering, and cutover playbooks.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling (DataDog, PagerDuty, Prometheus) that catch problems before pages fire.
• Write infrastructure as code in Terraform, ship it through CI/CD, and participate in the on-call rotation and incident response for the services you own.
• Work AI-natively as the default mode of operation. Run multiple agents in parallel. Write prompts with real context and constraints. Review every diff like you wrote it yourself. Know when to throw the agent's output out and do it by hand.
• Evolve the team's AI-native practices — prompt libraries, evals, review rituals, and the guardrails that make all of it safe at production scale.
• Mentor teammates, raise the bar on technical standards, and contribute to the team's API design, data contracts, and integration patterns.

Compensation

For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $148,000 to $216,500 USD. For candidates based out of Canada, the salary range is 171,500 to $201,000 CAD. 

Note: 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 We're Looking For

Technical foundation

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency with Java and Spring Boot — this is our primary stack and you should be comfortable reading, writing, and debugging it without assistance.
• Production experience with Apache Kafka or a comparable distributed streaming platform (Pulsar, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
• Solid grounding in distributed systems concepts: consistency, fault tolerance, replication, delivery semantics, and data durability tradeoffs.
• Comfortable with AWS (or equivalent cloud) and containerized deployments on Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or comparable IaC for real, multi-environment infrastructure.

AI-native working style

Specifically, we're looking for:

• Prompting excellence — you give agents context, constraints, and expected outcomes. You don't type "do X" and hope.
• Critical validation — you can explain every line the agent wrote, identify where it succeeded and where it fell short, and correct it. You treat AI output as a draft from a smart junior, not an oracle.
• Agentic decomposition — you break ambiguous problems into discrete, verifiable sub-tasks that an agent can actually execute, rather than handing it a blob of intent.
• Parallel workstreams — you run multiple agents or sessions concurrently on independent tasks instead of hand-holding one at a time.
• Troubleshooting with AI, not around it — when an agent hallucinates an API, suggests a deprecated library, or produces code that compiles but is wrong, you diagnose and recover. The interview is designed so things will go wrong; how you get unstuck is a signal.
• Technical authority — you understand the underlying tech (Kafka internals, Protobuf wire format, JDBC, SASL_SSL auth, partitioning semantics) well enough to catch the agent when it's confidently wrong.

What matters most to us

• Problem-solving mindset — you structure ambiguous problems precisely before reaching for a tool, AI or otherwise.
• Ownership — you take a feature from design through production and through the 3 a.m. page that follows.
• Direct, respectful communication — you can explain technical tradeoffs clearly, push back when you disagree, and change your mind when the evidence changes.
• Collaborative — you work well across teams and value perspectives that aren't your own.

Nice-to-have

• Go experience (we use it for CLI tools and some services).
• gRPC and Protocol Buffers in production, including schema evolution strategies.
• Stream processing frameworks — Kafka Streams, Flink (SQL or DataStream).
• Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud specifics (Schema Registry, Connect, ksqlDB, Stream Governance).
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions, artifact management (Maven, Nexus).
• Observability tooling — DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana.
• Prior experience on large-scale platform migrations or infrastructure modernization programs.
• Building or running evals for LLM-based workflows, prompt libraries, or agent tooling at your current or previous team.

Our Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits.
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees). Supplemental medical and dental plans 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 believe that different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds create a stronger and more creative work environment that delivers better results. Together, we continue to build an inclusive culture that encourages, supports, and celebrates the diverse voices of our employees. It fuels our innovation and connects us closer to our customers and the communities we serve. We strive to create a workplace that reflects the communities we serve and where everyone feels empowered to bring their authentic best selves to work.

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!