Staff Software Engineer, Backend (San Francisco, CA) Life360
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (San Francisco, CA) About Us

Life360 is a platform for today's busy families, bringing them closer together by helping them better sync, communicate with and protect the people they care about most.

Our mobile app provides millions of families in over 140 countries with services such as private location sharing, location history, drive details, crash detection, roadside assistance and help alerts through our free and paid membership subscription.

Founded in 2008, Life360 is based in San Francisco with offices in San Diego, Las Vegas and Ft. Lauderdale.

Life360 has raised +$100M from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, DCM, Fontinalis Partners, BMW iVentures, Allstate, Bullpen Capital, Founders Fund (FF Angel), Launch Capital, Kapor Capital, and 500 startups.

For more information, visit us at life360.com

About the Staff Engineer Role

A staff engineer at Life360 is a functional specialist that makes impact through either their technical depth or their ability to lead a group of engineers. They are the go-to expert for their function or area of ownership. They have the ability to create and execute quarterly technical goals, lead and vanguard our most complicated features, and mentor and advance the skills of lower-level engineers.

About the Context Awareness Team

The context awareness team provides up-to-date and real-time location and driving information as a service and is one of the most foundational and core teams at Life360. We build an engine for collecting, processing, and storing tens of thousands of events (location, driving, sensors) per second. We improve the systems which alert users in real-time when there is a vehicular collision. The team spends some time each quarter to research, prototype, and build new systems to provide location context to users, from things like "Peggy is driving" to "Peggy is at home," potentially using machine learning. This team is responsible for delivering on a roadmap that sees us growing our traffic 10x while handling the needs today of 5+ billion API calls per day.

Responsibilities

Life360 uses the LEST framework to help engineers grow in their careers. LEST stands for Leadership, Execution, Skills and Teamwork. For a staff engineer, here are the responsibilities for each of those categories.

Leadership

* Coach and mentor other engineers on specific and complicated technical areas
* Break down a difficult project to executable units
* Proactively seek opportunities to contribute to difficult projects
* Execute on long term strategy in a quarterly time frame
* Introduce new technologies to the functional team
* Help determine best engineering practices and processes
* Able to perform technical interviews for very senior positions
* Develop technical interviewing standards/tests/etc.
* Help recruit and attract talented engineers.

Execution

* Contribute to all levels of projects and features
* Effectively unblock projects through IC work and knowledge transfer
* Able to get excellent results with third-party tools and software, whether through contributions to open source projects or credible relationships with closed-source vendors
* Contribute to projects/features that you are not leading

Skills

* An expert in their technical area, outside of just Life360
* One of the most prolific developers in the company
* Delivers internal tools
* Experienced in all areas of tech stack and primary expert/owner of at least one area of solution
* Understand the code base as a whole and what parts need the most improvement

Teamwork

* Can be an expert to many teams
* Perform the most complex code reviews
* Partner with key individuals external to Product & Engineering.
* Communicate proactively and effectively to different kinds of audiences, including execs and non-technical stakeholders.

Specific requirements for this position

You're that someone with these relevant skills:

* 8+ years of software development experience.
* Proficient in JVM languages. This team uses primarily Java (Spring Boot) and Scala (Akka, Lagom); deep knowledge of either is required, of both is great
* Familiarity with PHP, Python, or Go since some of our systems are built using these.
* Excellent understanding of data stores, distributed systems, data modeling and their associated pitfalls.
* 4+ year experience with microservices
* Experience with the AWS environment and its various tools

Perks

* Competitive pay and benefits
* Medical, dental and vision insurance plans
* 401k plan
* $200/month Quality of Life perk
* No commute Friday's.
* Whatever makes you stronger makes us stronger. We buy you the things you need to improve yourself and get your job done.