Life360 - Staff Backend Engineer (AI Native), Family AI Lab
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Requirements
• 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. • You've built something where the data itself was the moat — and you understand why that's different from building on public data.
Responsibilities
• 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.
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
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