About The Team
The Devices Cloud team owns the backend services that power Life360's fleet of connected hardware — Tile trackers, Jiobit wearables, Pet GPS trackers, and emerging device categories. We manage real-time device state, high-frequency telemetry ingest, and the cloud infrastructure that translates physical-world signals into reliable, family-facing experiences. Our work sits at the intersection of hardware, firmware, mobile, and platform — and runs at a scale where correctness and reliability aren't optional.
We are an AI-Native team. AI isn't an add-on to how we work — it's how we work. We've redesigned our development workflows around AI, using it as a first-class collaborator at every stage: spec writing, code generation, test authoring, incident triage, and system design. We ship faster and go deeper because of it. We're looking for engineers who want to help define what AI-native backend development looks like for complex, hardware-connected systems.
About the Job
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Devices Cloud team, you will design and deliver the core cloud systems that power Life360's connected hardware — Tile trackers, Jiobit wearables, and emerging device categories. You own complete features and subsystems across real-time state management, high-frequency telemetry ingest, and the integration layer that connects physical hardware to family-facing experiences.
You operate with a high degree of autonomy. You participate in technical design, break down complex work, deliver accurate estimates, and lead medium-sized projects end to end. You partner closely with firmware, mobile, platform, and data teams, mentor junior engineers, and help raise the team's engineering standards. Your work shapes systems serving tens of millions of families daily.
You are also a strong practitioner of AI-native engineering. You use AI as a first-class collaborator across spec writing, coding, testing, and incident triage — and you share the practices that work so the whole team moves faster.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, and operate Devices Cloud services — device connectivity, telemetry ingest, state management, command/control, and data pipelines — ensuring they are scalable, secure, and reliable at Life360's scale.
- Own complete features and subsystems from technical design through production, breaking down complex work, identifying dependencies, and delivering accurate estimates.
- Apply AI-native engineering practices day to day: use AI assistants for spec writing, code generation, test coverage, and incident response, and share the prompting strategies that work with the team.
- Partner with firmware, mobile, product, and platform teams to define APIs and integration patterns that translate cleanly across the hardware-software boundary.
- Lead medium-sized, cross-functional initiatives, coordinating the work of other engineers and keeping delivery on track.
- Identify risks, bottlenecks, and security gaps in your areas of ownership, and build in the automation and tests that prevent regressions.
- Mentor junior engineers: coach them on structuring changes for review, conduct thorough code reviews, and help grow their skills.
- Communicate progress, trade-offs, and technical concepts clearly to peers, partner teams, and your manager.
- Write clear, concise technical specifications, and contribute to team documentation and knowledge sharing.
- Participate in on-call rotation and contribute to high-severity incident response and post-mortems.
What We’re Looking For
- 3+ years of experience building and operating backend or cloud infrastructure systems, ideally including some IoT, telematics, or hardware-adjacent work.
- Track record of owning complete features and subsystems, contributing to technical design, and leading medium-sized projects to delivery.
- Strong experience with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS: EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, etc.), distributed systems, and data pipelines.
- Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants for substantive engineering work, with the judgment to review and own everything you ship.
- Experience mentoring junior engineers and helping raise team-wide engineering standards.
- Strong communication skills: able to explain technical concepts clearly to peers, partner teams, and managers.
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and managing competing priorities within and across teams.
- Experience with high-frequency ingest systems, time-series data, and streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis, or similar).
- Bachelor’s Degree in a Technical field, or equivalent experience.
Nice to Have
- Experience with IoT, telematics, embedded, or firmware-adjacent systems.
- Background in SRE practices, reliability engineering, and progressive delivery.
- Familiarity with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, DataDog).
- Experience contributing to industry conversations: open-source projects, conference talks, or technical publications.
- Knowledge of hardware/firmware communication protocols (MQTT, BLE, CoAP, etc.).