Director, Engineering, Platform/Services

Advance Venture Partners, LLC.; United States; Remote; USD 217,000 - 319,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance (100

401(k) plan with company matching

Parental leave

Mental Wellness Program & EAP

Generous PTO and holidays

Learning & Development programs

Equipment and remote-work reimburse

Job summary

Life360 is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead and operate our core platforms, including location, messaging, cloud infrastructure, and partner ecosystems. You will set technical direction, develop strong engineering leaders, and ensure reliability, security, and scalable systems for hundreds of millions of members worldwide.

This leadership role blends deep technical judgment with business impact. You will mentor managers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with Product,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams.
• Track record of leading backend or platform engineering at high scale.
• Demonstrated success coaching managers, including former ICs who grew into leadership.
• Experience translating company strategy into technical plans.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems with respect for their history.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills to resolve ownership conflicts.
• Hands-on credibility in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems (AWS preferred).
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Build the foundation for scale by leading teams behind location, messaging, cloud, and identity platforms.
• Anticipate bottlenecks and reliability risks, modernize systems, and balance near-term needs with long-term investments.
• Ensure high availability, performance, observability, security, and incident response.
• Create an engineering culture with ownership and accountability, empowering leaders to deliver outcomes.
• Establish meaningful engineering metrics across reliability, cost, and productivity.
• Grow leaders by hiring, coaching, and developing managers and senior engineers.
• Build reusable services and platforms to accelerate product teams and expand partnerships.
• Translate technical investments into business outcomes and communicate impact to leadership.

Skills

Software engineering

Lead engineering teams

Backend platforms

Coaching managers

Translate strategy into plans

Modernize legacy systems

Cross-functional partnership

Cloud infrastructure

AWS experience

Communication skills

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

Job description

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 102.4 million monthly active users (MAU), as of June 30, 2026, 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 remote (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

Our Services engineering teams, part of our Quality and Scale Pillar, build and run the systems every Life360 member relies on but never sees. We carry location data between members's phones and our servers, deliver the push and SMS notifications that families depend on, verify who members are and what they can access, build and scale our business critical services and give partners a safe way to build on Life360. When we do our jobs well, product teams ship faster and families trust the app in the moments that matter most.

We are a group of backend, cloud, and mobile engineers who care about reliability, security, and scale, and who treat member trust as the foundation of everything we build.

About the Job

As a Director of Engineering, you will lead the teams building and operating Life360's critical platforms, including location and messaging, cloud infrastructure and identity, and partner ecosystems. These systems are the foundation of the experiences millions of families rely on every day. You are a player coach who will set technical direction, develop strong engineering managers and technical leaders, and ensure our platforms are reliable, secure, and built to scale as Life360 grows to hundreds of millions of members worldwide.

This is a leadership role that combines deep technical judgment with business impact. You will anticipate scaling challenges before they become problems, modernize critical systems, and make thoughtful tradeoffs across reliability, performance, cost, and speed. You will partner closely with Product, Security, Data, and engineering leaders to connect technology investments to business outcomes, accelerate product innovation, and build an engineering organization that can deliver at scale.

For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $216,500 to $318,500 USD. For candidates based out of Canada, the salary range for this position is 251,000 to 295,000 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, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience in determining final salary. Base pay may also vary based on geographic location, with US work locations falling into one of three geographic tiers.

Total compensation is inclusive of equity compensation in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), as well as a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits.

What You'll Do

• Build the foundation for scale. Lead the engineering teams behind Life360's critical services, including location and messaging, cloud and identity, and partner platforms. Build reliable, secure, and scalable systems that can support hundreds of millions of members around the world.
• See around corners. Anticipate architectural bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling challenges before they impact members. Set technical direction, modernize legacy systems, and balance near-term business needs with long-term platform investments.
• Make reliability a competitive advantage. Establish high standards for availability, performance, observability, security, and incident response. Build resilient systems that proactively detect and prevent failures, ensuring members can trust Life360 in the moments that matter most.
• Build a culture of ownership and accountability. Create an engineering organization where teams proactively identify problems, take responsibility for outcomes, and drive solutions without waiting for direction. Empower leaders to make decisions, challenge the status quo, and continuously raise the bar for engineering excellence across organizational boundaries.
• Make the invisible visible. Establish meaningful engineering metrics across reliability, performance, cost, security, and developer productivity. Use data to identify risks, prioritize investments, and communicate platform health and business impact to senior leadership.
• Grow leaders who grow teams. Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers, staff engineers, and technical leaders. Build a high-performing organization with clear accountability, strong technical judgment, and leaders who can make decisions and deliver outcomes independently.
• Accelerate the entire engineering organization. Build reusable services, APIs, and platforms that reduce duplication and enable product teams to ship faster. Expand our partner ecosystem through secure, scalable integrations that make it easier to build on Life360.
• Turn engineering investments into business outcomes. Connect technical strategy to member experience, product velocity, and business performance. Make deliberate tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, cost, and speed, and use meaningful metrics to demonstrate impact and inform investment decisions.
• Lead through influence. Partner across Product, Security, Data, and Engineering to align priorities, resolve ambiguity, and drive cross-functional decisions. Translate company strategy to senior leadership.
• Stay close to the technology and embrace what's next. Engage in architectural reviews and critical technical decisions, challenge assumptions, and empower teams to make pragmatic tradeoffs. Champion AI-assisted development, automation, and modern engineering practices to improve productivity, quality, and speed.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams, with experience managing managers.
• Track record of leading backend or platform engineering at high scale, with distributed systems serving millions of users. B2B or B2C platform experience is welcome.
• Demonstrated success developing and coaching managers, including former individual contributors who grew into leadership.
• Experience translating company strategy into technical plans, and representing your teams’ needs back to senior leaders.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems with respect for the history behind them, and the judgment to change what needs changing rather than everything.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, with a record of resolving ownership and priority conflicts directly.
• Hands-on technical credibility in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems (AWS experience preferred).
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Our Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees). We offer life and disability as well as 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.
• Paid parental leave.
• Mental Wellness Program & Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental well-being.
• Generous time off: flexible PTO, companywide holidays throughout the year plus summer and winter shutdowns.
• Learning & Development programs.
• Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment.
• Free Life360 Platinum Membership and Tile trackers.

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