Staff AI Architect, Family AI Lab

Life360

7d•Remote

About The Position

Life360 is seeking a Staff AI Architect for its Family AI Lab. This role is crucial for integrating Life360's deterministic backend systems (location data, family graph, behavioral signals, user insights) with the probabilistic world of Large Language Models (LLMs). The architect will own the end-to-end inference pipeline, including model selection, serving infrastructure, evaluation loops, prompt and context strategy, and cloud services. The goal is to create a seamless user experience, ensure data safety, and manage inference costs effectively. This position requires a cloud engineer deeply fluent in production AI systems.

Requirements

Deep engineering experience with significant time spent building and running AI systems in production at meaningful scale, including real users, real load, and real on-call experience.
Fluency in modern LLM serving technologies (e.g., vLLM, TGI, SGLang, hosted APIs).
Experience building evaluation harnesses and understanding the difference between subjective iteration and objective progress.
Ability to build a cloud system from the ground up, selecting services, integrating them, ensuring reliability, and managing costs.
Strong understanding of inference cost management and identifying areas of potential overspending.
AI-native daily workflow, with hands-on experience in tools like Claude Code or Cursor, and a native understanding of agentic workflows, prompt engineering, context window management, and MCP/function calling.
Comfort with making decisions with incomplete information and building with a moving target specification.
Strong written communication skills for creating precise specs, decision records, and playbooks.
Experience with agent systems, retrieval pipelines, or long-context personalization.
Experience with privacy architecture in multi-user systems where context is shared across users with different access rights.
Experience building systems where data itself is a competitive advantage.

Nice To Haves

Self-starter energy and a desire to operate on founder hours.
Preference for conversational and sketch-based design over lengthy PRDs.
A track record of shipping frequently, prioritizing momentum over polish.
A proactive approach to identifying and solving problems.
Ability to hold strong opinions and change them based on evidence.
Experience as a customer of the products being built.

Responsibilities

Architect the inference pipeline that turns Life360 into a context layer LLMs can reason over, incorporating soul files, family context, behavioral signals, and document understanding.
Choose appropriate models and hosting solutions, deciding between self-hosted, API-based, fine-tuned, or prompt-engineered approaches, and adapting these decisions as the landscape evolves.
Build and manage the serving infrastructure, focusing on latency budgets, batching, caching, fallbacks, and graceful degradation to ensure scalability.
Develop the evaluation loop to objectively measure system improvements and ensure the product is genuinely enhancing user experience, not just appearing different.
Own the cost model, tracking spend per user, feature, and family, and identifying levers for cost optimization such as context compression, model routing, and pre-computation.
Define data persistence, summarization, and discard strategies, determining the architecture for how data is presented to LLMs.
Establish infrastructure-level standards for safety, privacy, and trust, including filtering sensitive categories, implementing encryption, access controls, and audit trails.

Benefits

Competitive pay and benefits.
Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees).
Supplemental plans for medical and dental for Canadian employees.
401(k) plan with company matching program in the US.
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.
Equity.