Senior Software Engineer II (AI-Native), Messaging

Life360 is a company focused on keeping families connected through their mobile app and tracking devices. The Senior Software Engineer II on the Messaging team will design, build, and maintain the streaming infrastructure that powers real-time features, collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure system reliability and performance at scale.

Responsibilities:

• 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 with cross-functional teams on API design, data contracts, and integration patterns
• Write infrastructure as code using Terraform and automate deployments through CI/CD pipelines
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response
• Mentor team members and contribute to team processes, technical standards, and help evolve the team's AI-native engineering practices
• Work with AI (Claude Code) as a first-class collaborator - orchestrating agents to scaffold services, generate IaC, draft schema definitions, and accelerate code review
• Apply agentic workflows to reduce overall cycle time and operational overhead

Requirements:

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency with Java and Spring Boot (this is our primary stack)
• Experience with Apache Kafka or similar distributed streaming platforms
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts: consistency, fault tolerance, replication, and data durability
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and containerized deployments
• Familiarity with agentic workflows, prompt/eval engineering
• Problem-solving mindset - You structure ambiguous problems precisely before reaching for a tool, AI or otherwise
• Collaborative approach - You communicate clearly, work well across teams, and value diverse perspectives
• Ownership mentality - You take responsibility for your work from design through production and beyond
• AI-native working style - You use AI tooling (Claude Code or equivalent) as a genuine development partner: delegating discrete tasks, reviewing outputs critically, and running parallel workstreams rather than hand-holding one agent at a time
• Thoughtful communication - You can explain technical tradeoffs and articulate ideas effectively
• Experience with Go (we use it for CLI tools and some services)
• Familiarity with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
• Background in stream processing frameworks (Kafka Streams, Flink)
• Experience with schema registries and schema evolution strategies
• Knowledge of Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud
• Understanding of CI/CD patterns, GitHub Actions, and artifact management (Maven, Nexus)
• Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog)
• Previous work on large-scale platform migrations or infrastructure modernization projects