Staff Data Engineer

Life360

11h • $190,000 - $280,500 • Remote

About The Position

The Data & Analytics team is building the next generation of our data platform to power real-time decision-making, experimentation, ML, and large-scale analytics at Life360. We operate at significant scale and complexity in a high-ambiguity environment and expect engineers to take ownership, drive clarity, and raise standards across the organization.

We are hiring a bar-raising Staff Data Engineer who doesn’t just improve systems, but defines how we build them. This role requires someone who can step into ambiguity, make sound architectural decisions, eliminate operational fragility, and establish an engineering discipline that others adopt.

You will serve as a technical reference point for the data platform — shaping standards, influencing cross-team architecture, and driving initiatives to clear, production-ready outcomes. We value engineers who are direct, collaborative, and proactive in surfacing risks early, while helping build a team culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist.

At Life360, we collect a lot of data: 60 billion unique location points, 12 billion user actions, 8 billion miles driven every single month, and so much more. Our data platform must be resilient, observable, cost-efficient, and designed for long-term scalability.

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will drive the evolution of our data architecture — not just maintain it. You will:

Identify structural weaknesses and eliminate operational fragility.
Define clear ingestion, validation, and testing standards across the platform.
Drive ambiguous initiatives from concept to production-ready outcomes.
Produce decisive technical artifacts and recommendations that enable leadership decisions.
Raise the engineering bar across CI/CD, observability, cost efficiency, and documentation discipline.

We are looking for someone with strong engineering depth who demonstrates ownership, decisiveness, and the ability to elevate both the system and the team around them.

For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $190,000 to $280,500 USD. For candidates based out of Canada, the salary range for this position is $220,000 to $260,000 CAD. We take into consideration an individual's background and experience in determining final salary; therefore, base pay offered may vary considerably depending on geographic location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The compensation package includes a wide range of medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits, as well as equity.

Requirements

• 8+ years designing and operating high-volume distributed data systems in production.
• Deep expertise with a cloud data platform (Databricks preferred) and AWS, including performance tuning and cost optimization.
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and Spark for large-scale processing.
• Hands-on experience with dbt and understanding of how platform decisions impact downstream modeling.
• Strong grasp of data modeling, partitioning strategies, storage formats, and analytical workload optimization.
• Experience with Airflow
• Experience with modern CI/CD practices (GitHub Actions, Terraform).
• Experience designing and maintaining real-time streaming architectures
• Demonstrated ability to independently scope ambiguous problems and drive them to decisive outcomes.
• Track record of proactively escalating risks and closing long-running efforts with clear recommendations.
• Experience defining ingestion validation standards and implementing data quality controls.
• Proven ability to reduce operational fragility and eliminate single points of failure.
• Strong systems design skills across distributed and event-based architectures.
• Demonstrated technical leadership influencing cross-team architectural decisions.
• Excellent communication skills across engineering, analytics, product, and executive stakeholders.
• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve scalable, cost-efficient data platforms for real-time and batch analytics.
• Own data systems end-to-end — ingestion, streaming, transformation, storage, and serving.
• Design and implement distributed data processing systems using Spark and Databricks on AWS.
• Build and optimize pipelines using Airflow and modern orchestration frameworks.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, testing, and observability.
• Establish clear ingestion and integration boundaries that eliminate single points of failure.
• Proactively surface risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs before they impact delivery.
• Produce clear technical artifacts and recommendations for stakeholders and leadership.
• Design logical and physical data models balancing flexibility, performance, governance, and scalability.
• Partner closely with Analytics Engineering, Data Science, ML Engineering, and Data Analytics to support high-quality silver/gold modeling.
• Harden pipelines with monitoring, alerting, SLAs, and recovery mechanisms.
• Mentor engineers and elevate distributed systems rigor across the team.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits.
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees). We offer 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.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

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