Senior Software Engineer II - Ads Team

About The Team

Join us as we build the next evolution of our backend services to support Life360’s continued global growth. As part of the Ads team, you will help scale and modernize our AdServer and Exchange platform — a high-availability, low-latency distributed system processing billions of requests and events per day.

We are evolving our backend architecture to power monetization across our ecosystem at massive scale. You will partner closely with Architecture and Product teams to expand our advertising capabilities, integrate new demand and supply partners, and support 20+ billion daily events.

Our team leverages AI technologies to enhance functionality and efficiency, enabling us to develop smarter solutions that significantly improve user experiences. Your contributions will be instrumental in supporting Life360’s growth and innovation in the ever-evolving landscape of digital services. Together, we are building systems that are resilient under heavy load, horizontally scalable, and flexible enough to meet rapidly evolving product demands.

At Life360, our teams are motivated by impact, thrive when empowered with high agency, are always curious, and build with engineering excellence as a first principle.

About the Job

As a Senior Software Engineer II on our Ads team, you will own the end-to-end development of key projects within our ad server and real-time bidding (RTB) solutions. This includes defining project scope, designing architecture, implementing features, and ensuring high-quality deliverables. You will play a pivotal role in shaping our technological direction and driving innovations that enhance our offerings in the digital advertising landscape, particularly through AI-native development.

In this role, you will leverage AI technologies to improve targeting, optimize bidding strategies, and enhance user experiences. Your expertise in AI will be essential in navigating the evolving landscape of digital advertising, empowering us to effectively meet the growing demands of the market.

The evolution of digital advertising necessitates the enhancement of our solutions, and your contributions will be vital in integrating AI-driven functionalities into our products. By taking on this position, you will have the opportunity to shape the future of our offerings while collaborating with senior engineers and mentoring junior team members. Your work will directly influence our ability to remain competitive and responsive to market trends, making this an exciting time to join our team.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain high-throughput backend services on the AdServer and Exchange platform, contributing to reliability, scalability, and performance targets.
• Implement and improve Real-Time Bidding and auction logic, and support integrations with demand and supply partners.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and architects to execute on platform design decisions and raise concerns where you see gaps.
• Own features end-to-end — from design through deployment — with a focus on correctness, observability, and operational health.
• Partner with Product on new ad formats and monetization capabilities, translating requirements into solid technical designs.
• Contribute to monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis to improve overall platform reliability.
• Use AI tooling (including Claude Code) as a day-to-day collaborator — generating scaffolding, drafting schemas, and accelerating code review.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team standards around code quality, testing, and engineering practices.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5–8 years of backend engineering experience, with strong proficiency in Java and multi-threaded system design.
• Experience building or operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems in production.
• Solid understanding of data consistency, performance trade-offs, and database fundamentals.
• Comfort working in cloud-native environments, ideally AWS.
• Familiarity with AdTech concepts (RTB, auctions, supply/demand integrations) is a plus.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs or partner systems is a plus.
• Clear, direct communication — you can explain a technical decision to an engineer or a product manager without losing either of them.
• Openness to using agentic workflows and AI-assisted development to reduce cycle time and operational overhead.

AI-Native Expectations

We use AI coding tools as a professional standard on this team. Here's what that means in practice:

• Daily use: You use AI coding assistants (we support Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot) for real, substantive tasks: analysis, coding, refactoring, testing, navigating codebases, and documentation. Not just research or autocomplete.
• Judgment and ownership: AI-generated code gets the same review you'd give any PR. You are accountable for everything you ship.
• Velocity: We expect senior engineers who use AI well to operate with meaningful leverage — doing more with the same time, taking on problems that would otherwise require a larger team.
• Team leadership: You share what works. You automate prompting strategies that others can build on and help teammates earlier in their AI workflow adoption get up to speed.
• Continuous learning: The tooling is changing fast. You stay current and bring recommendations to the team when something would meaningfully improve how we work.