Sr. Staff Backend Engineer AI-Native, Devices Cloud

Life360

4h•Remote

About The Position

As a Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer on the Devices Cloud team, you will own the technical direction of the cloud systems that power Life360's connected hardware — Tile trackers, Jiobit wearables, and emerging device categories. This is a systems-level leadership role: you are the recognized technical authority for our device cloud infrastructure, spanning real-time state management, high-frequency telemetry ingest, and the integration layer that connects physical hardware to family-facing experiences. At this level, your work extends well beyond implementation. You set technical direction, define architectural standards, mentor Staff and Senior engineers, and partner with engineering and product leadership to align the technical roadmap with company goals. You operate across teams and functional groups — influencing firmware, mobile, platform, and data teams — and your decisions shape systems serving tens of millions of families daily. You are also a leader in AI-native engineering. You don't just use AI — you define how it should be used. You architect agent-driven workflows, codify practices that multiply team output, and partner with engineering leadership to spread these patterns across the broader organization.

Requirements

12+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale backend or cloud infrastructure systems — with a strong preference for IoT, telematics, or hardware-adjacent domains.
Demonstrated track record of setting technical direction across teams, driving architectural decisions, and aligning engineering roadmaps with business goals.
Deep expertise with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS: EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, etc.), distributed systems design, and high-throughput data pipelines.
Strong hands-on experience with agentic AI workflows — not just prompt engineering, but architecting multi-agent systems, managing context, and building AI-native development practices at a team or org level.
Proven ability to mentor Staff and Senior engineers, elevate team-wide engineering standards, and drive cultural change through influence rather than authority.
Exceptional communication skills: able to distill complex architectural concepts for diverse audiences, from junior engineers to executive leadership.
Ability to navigate ambiguity, manage competing priorities across groups, and lead through influence in a cross-functional environment.
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 Haves

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.).

Responsibilities

Own the technical architecture and long-term roadmap for Devices Cloud systems — device connectivity, telemetry ingest, state management, command/control, and data pipelines — ensuring they are scalable, secure, and resilient at Life360's scale.
Define and drive system-level technical direction across multiple teams, identifying architectural trade-offs, resolving cross-team design conflicts, and aligning engineering efforts with company strategy.
Lead AI-native engineering practices for Devices Cloud: architect agentic workflows, codify patterns for AI-assisted spec writing, code generation, test coverage, and incident response — and partner with org leadership to extend these playbooks broadly.
Partner with firmware, mobile, product, and platform teams to define APIs, integration standards, and device-driven workflows that translate cleanly across the hardware-software boundary.
Drive the architecture and delivery of large-scale, cross-team initiatives — from conception through production — managing dependencies, unblocking teams, and maintaining accountability for outcomes.
Anticipate system bottlenecks, failure modes, and security risks before they materialize; define safeguards and engineering standards that prevent class-of-problem recurrences.
Mentor and grow Staff and Senior engineers across the team: provide architectural guidance, conduct high-quality technical reviews, and act as a force multiplier for team output.
Collaborate with engineering and product leadership to influence organizational priorities, advocate for technical investments, and communicate technical strategy to executive stakeholders.
Represent the team in cross-functional forums; produce clear, concise architectural documentation and roadmap artifacts accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Participate in on-call rotation and lead high-severity incident response, including post-mortems and systemic remediation.