Backend Engineer – Platform

About Life
360

Life
360’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. Life
360 serves approximately 91.6 million monthly active users (MAU), as of September 30, 2025, across more than 180 countries.

Life
360 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 who are basically family).

Life
360 has more than 500 (and growing!) remote‑first employees. For more information, please visit

Life
360 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) regardless of any specified location above.

The Location Experiences team owns the location platform that powers Life
360’s core value proposition: delivering fast, accurate, and emotionally resonant location experiences to over 90 million members worldwide. We are responsible for the data collection strategy, location intelligence, and real‑time processing infrastructure that enables families to answer “Where is my family?”. Our backend systems process billions of low‑latency location events daily, handle high‑frequency device telemetry, and provide the location platform and APIs that other teams build on.

We work at the intersection of distributed systems, geospatial computing, and real‑time data processing—building the foundation that turns location data into peace of mind, safety, and connection for millions of families. This is a small, high‑impact team where individual contributions directly shape system architecture, platform reliability, and the core member experience.

We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to architect, build, and evolve our location platform infrastructure. This is a critical, high‑impact role for an exceptional distributed systems engineer who will take technical ownership of complex subsystems, drive architectural direction, and solve hard problems at the intersection of geospatial computing, high‑throughput data processing, and real‑time systems.

You will work on systems processing billions of location events per day, design scalable geospatial services, build resilient distributed architectures using Kafka and NATS, and create libraries and frameworks that other engineering teams depend on. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, location and geospatial algorithms, and a track record of leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams.

Salary ranges:

• US‑based: $200k – $280k
• Canada‑based: 220k – 260k CAD

The compensation package includes a wide range of medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits, as well as equity.

• Design, architect, and build high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for real‑time location processing, geofencing, and location intelligence at scale (billions of events/day)
• Take technical ownership of critical subsystems from inception to production, driving architectural decisions, managing dependencies, and coordinating across multiple teams
• Lead the design and development of geospatial libraries, location algorithms, and platform services that other teams build on—establishing standards and best practices for location data processing across the organization
• Architect distributed systems using Java and Go, leveraging Kafka and NATS for event streaming, real‑time data pipelines, and inter‑service communication
• Drive technical design specifications, translate architectural decisions into actionable engineering plans, and mentor engineers on distributed systems patterns and location platform architecture
• Identify and address technical debt, scalability bottlenecks, and engineering…