Director, Engineering, Platform/Services

Life360

10h • $216,500 - $318,500 • Remote

About The Position

The Director of Engineering leads teams responsible for Life360’s critical platforms, including location and messaging, cloud infrastructure and identity, and partner ecosystems. This player-coach role sets technical direction, develops engineering managers and technical leaders, and ensures platforms are reliable, secure, and capable of scaling as Life360 grows. The role calls for deep technical judgment and a focus on connecting engineering investments to business outcomes.

The Director anticipates scaling challenges, modernizes critical systems, and makes thoughtful tradeoffs across reliability, performance, cost, and speed. Working closely with Product, Security, Data, and Engineering leaders, this person aligns technology investments with business outcomes, accelerates product innovation, and builds an organization able to deliver at scale. Life360 is a remote-first company; positions can be performed remotely within the US and Canada unless otherwise specified. The position’s compensation includes equity in the form of RSUs and a benefits package.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and experience managing managers.
• Track record 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 team needs to senior leaders.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems with sound judgment about what needs to change.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills and a record of resolving ownership and priority conflicts directly.
• Hands-on technical credibility in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• AWS experience is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams building and operating location and messaging, cloud and identity, and partner platforms.
• Build reliable, secure, and scalable systems capable of supporting hundreds of millions of members worldwide.
• Anticipate architectural bottlenecks, reliability risks, and scaling challenges; set technical direction and modernize legacy systems.
• Establish high standards for availability, performance, observability, security, and incident response, and build systems that detect and prevent failures.
• Create a culture of ownership and accountability, empowering teams and leaders to make decisions and continuously improve engineering practices.
• Establish engineering metrics for reliability, performance, cost, security, and developer productivity; use data to prioritize investment and communicate platform health and business impact.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers, staff engineers, and technical leaders.
• Build reusable services, APIs, and platforms that reduce duplication and help product teams ship faster; expand the partner ecosystem through secure, scalable integrations.
• Connect technical strategy to member experience, product velocity, and business performance, making deliberate tradeoffs and demonstrating impact through metrics.
• Partner across Product, Security, Data, and Engineering to align priorities, resolve ambiguity, and make cross-functional decisions; translate company strategy into engineering roadmaps and communicate technical risks and tradeoffs to senior leadership.
• Participate 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.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance plans; US employee medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans are 100% paid, and Canadian employees have life and disability coverage and supplemental medical and dental plans.
• 401(k) with company matching for US employees; RRSP with DPSP plan for Canadian employees.
• Paid parental leave.
• Mental Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
• Flexible PTO, companywide holidays, and summer and winter shutdowns.
• Learning and Development programs.
• Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment.
• Free Life360 Platinum Membership and Tile trackers.
• Equity compensation in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director