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Salary: USD 216,500 - 318,500 / annual
Life360 is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the platform and services teams that build and operate the critical systems millions of families depend on daily. The company serves approximately 102.4 million monthly active users across 180+ countries with a mobile app, Tile tracking devices, and Pet GPS tracker offering location sharing, safe driver reports, and crash detection with emergency dispatch.
In this role, you will lead backend, cloud, and mobile engineering teams responsible for location and messaging systems, cloud infrastructure and identity, and partner ecosystems. You are a player-coach who combines deep technical judgment with business impact, setting technical direction, developing strong engineering managers and technical leaders, and ensuring platforms are reliable, secure, and scalable.
Key responsibilities include: building the foundation for scale by leading teams behind critical services; anticipating architectural bottlenecks and scaling challenges before they impact members; establishing high standards for availability, performance, observability, security, and incident response; creating a culture of ownership and accountability; establishing meaningful engineering metrics across reliability, performance, cost, security, and developer productivity; hiring, coaching, and developing engineering managers and staff engineers; building reusable services and APIs that enable product teams to ship faster; connecting technical strategy to member experience and business performance; and partnering across Product, Security, Data, and Engineering to align priorities.
You will stay engaged with critical technical decisions, champion AI-assisted development and modern engineering practices, and modernize legacy systems while balancing near-term business needs with long-term platform investments.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams with experience managing managers
- Track record of leading backend or platform engineering at high scale with distributed systems serving millions of users
- B2B or B2C platform experience
- Demonstrated success developing and coaching managers, including former individual contributors who grew into leadership
- Experience translating company strategy into technical plans and representing teams' needs to senior leaders
- Experience modernizing legacy systems with judgment about what needs changing
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills with record of resolving ownership and priority conflicts
- Hands-on technical credibility in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems (AWS experience preferred)
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
