Senior Software Engineer II (AI-Native), Messaging

About Life360

Life360’s mission is to keep people close to the ones they love. Our category-leading mobile app,Tile tracking devices, and Pet GPS tracker empower members to protect the people, pets, and things they care about most with a range of services, including location sharing, safe driver reports, and crash detection with emergency dispatch. Life360 serves approximately 95.8 million monthly active users (MAU), as of December 31, 2025, across more than 180 countries.

Life360 delivers peace of mind and enhances everyday family life with seamless coordination for all the moments that matter, big and small. By continuing to innovate and deliver for our customers, we have become a household name and the must-have mobile-based membership for families (and those friends that basically are family). 

Life360 has more than 500 (and growing!) remote-first employees. For more information, please visit life360.com.

Life360 is a Remote First company, which means a remote work environment will be the primary experience for all employees. All positions, unless otherwise specified, can be performed remotely (within the US and Canada) regardless of any specified location above.

About The Team

The Messaging team owns the backbone of Life360’s real-time infrastructure, powering the event streaming and data pipelines that keep millions of families connected. We process billions of events every day, enabling everything from location updates to safety alerts through reliable, high-throughput streaming systems.

Our work sits at the center of Life360’s technical ecosystem. We collaborate closely with mobile, backend, and data teams to build scalable, resilient infrastructure while tackling complex distributed systems challenges like schema evolution, data consistency, zero-downtime migrations, and platform reliability at scale. We are a platform-focused, AI-Native team. AI is a core collaborator across the full product lifecycle: messaging architecture, protocol design, performance at scale, and incident response. We move faster, build more resiliently, and go deeper on the hard problems of distributed messaging because of it.

The team is currently leading major innovation initiatives, including migrating from MSK to Confluent Cloud, managing organization-wide schema registries and protocol buffer definitions, and building the next generation of streaming services. Our stack includes Kafka and Kafka Streams, Spring Boot microservices, Go-based tooling, and a modern cloud-native platform on AWS.

About the Job

You'll help define and deliver the next generation of Kafka-first streaming infrastructure, driving the solution to meet the next company goal for high availability on scale. 

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Messaging team, you'll build and maintain the streaming infrastructure that powers Life360's real-time features. This role is hands-on and collaborative - you'll design services, write code, troubleshoot production issues, and help shape the team's technical direction. We're looking for someone who enjoys working in a distributed systems environment, values clear communication, and thrives on solving complex problems alongside a small, focused team. We work AI-natively - you'll be expected to direct AI agents as a core part of your daily workflow, not as an afterthought.

For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $148,000 to $216,500 USD. 

Note: 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.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain streaming services using Kafka, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud Stream
• Develop and manage Kafka connectors for data integration (DynamoDB, S3, custom sinks/sources)
• Own schema management and evolution using Protocol Buffers, Schema Registry, and multi-language code generation
• Support ongoing platform migrations, including multi-cluster consumption patterns and infrastructure transitions
• Build monitoring, observability, and operational tooling to ensure system reliability
• Collaborate w