Undisclosed use of AI not previously discussed with or approved by your Recruiter may impact your candidacy.
About The Team
The Ads Data Engineering team's purpose is to design, build, and maintain scalable and efficient data infrastructure that empowers Life360 teams to make data-driven decisions. We transform raw data into reliable, accessible, and actionable insights, ensuring data quality, compliance, security, costs and performance at every step. We help teams across the business unlock the full potential of their data, driving operational excellence and strategic growth. We also push the boundaries of how work gets done by adopting AI tools that accelerate our development and expand what we can deliver to stakeholders, so families get faster, more reliable experiences.
About the Job
At Life360, we collect an enormous amount of data: billions of location points, user actions, and miles driven every month, and so much more. Our analysts, ad strategists, and sales team rely on that data to run campaigns, report performance, and close deals. The core datasets and pipelines behind that work are built and in production, and the demand for new datasets, metrics, and self-serve access is growing. As a Senior Ads Data Engineer, you will own that platform on Databricks: making the existing pipelines faster, cheaper, and more reliable, and extending them as new questions come in. You will work directly with the people who use the data, and you will keep one agreed definition for each core metric so every team sees the same numbers.
For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $129,000 to $192,000 USD. For candidates based out of Canada, the salary range for this position is $149,500 to $177,500 CAD. Note: Please be aware that the job title for positions in Canada will be "Developer" in lieu of "Engineer." We take into consideration an individual's background, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience in determining final salary. Base pay may also vary based on geographic location, with US work locations falling into one of three geographic tiers.
Total compensation is inclusive of equity compensation in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), as well as a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits.
What You’ll Do
Primary responsibilities include, but are not limited to
Enhance, extend, and operate our existing batch and streaming pipelines and Delta Lake tables on Databricks, evolving the platform across ingestion, orchestration, storage, and serving as data volume and business needs grow.
Partner with business analysts, ad strategists, and the sales team to understand their questions and turn them into durable data and insights products, such as campaign performance, audience, and revenue reporting.
Build and maintain dbt models and tests for curated Silver/Gold datasets, and own the semantic layer and core business metrics so every team works from a single, trusted definition of performance.
Manage Databricks and AWS infrastructure as code with Terraform.
Integrate and reconcile data from ad platforms, CRM, partner feeds, and internal systems, including migrations off legacy tools and reports.
Implement data quality tests, monitoring, lineage, SLAs, and alerting, and define data contracts with upstream producers, leading root-cause analysis when data breaks.
Tune Spark and Databricks workloads for performance and cost (query plans, partitioning, shuffle and skew, cluster sizing), and make cost-aware design decisions as the platform grows.
Establish engineering best practices (version control, CI/CD, code review, testing, documentation), and mentor engineers and help shape the team’s technical roadmap.
Apply data governance, privacy, and access controls (PII, GDPR, CCPA, SOX) across the platform.
Enhance our LLM development support capabilities by creating tools, skills, and agents that give our LLMs more context and help us debug, build, and maintain systems faster.
Success in Year One
Within the first year, the person hired will be the go-to engineer for our foundational data models and pipelines. Pipeline runtime and compute spend will be measurably lower, and the datasets and metrics that analysts, ad strategists, and sales use will have clear owners and documented definitions. Stakeholders will answer more of their own questions without waiting on the data team, and the first set of enhancements they asked for will be in production.
What We’re Looking For
5+ years of experience in data engineering building production data platforms at enterprise scale, with demonstrated ownership of data products and cross-functional collaboration.
Deep, hands-on expertise with Apache Spark (PySpark and/or Scala), including partitioning and shuffle behavior, joins, skew handling, caching, and diagnosing and tuning slow or costly jobs.
Deep knowledge of the Databricks platform, including Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Jobs/Workflows, Databricks Asset Bundles, Structured Streaming, and SQL Warehouses, with proven experience optimizing workloads for performance and cost (cluster and warehouse sizing, autoscaling, Photon, serverless).
Strong SQL and Python (or Scala) skills for pipeline development, automation, and query optimization.
Hands-on production experience with dbt, including model design, testing, documentation, and incremental strategies, running on Databricks in CI/CD-driven workflows.
Hands-on experience with Terraform for managing cloud and data platform infrastructure as code, and with AWS (S3, IAM, and networking fundamentals as they relate to data platforms).
Strong experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Databricks Workflows, or similar), Git, and CI/CD, and with building reliable, observable pipelines.
Solid understanding of data modeling (dimensional modeling, star schemas, medallion architecture) and experience building semantic layers or metric definitions.
Experience inheriting, refactoring, and improving existing data models and pipelines, with an eye toward reliability, maintainability, and backward compatibility for downstream consumers.
Experience using AI/LLM coding assistants (for example, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code), with a disciplined approach to reviewing, testing, and owning generated code rather than accepting it at face value.
Strong business acumen and excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate requirements from analysts, ad strategists, and sales teams into well-designed data products and explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
Familiarity with data governance and compliance requirements (GDPR, CCPA, SOX) and with BI tools (Domo, Tableau, Looker, or similar).
Prior experience with advertising, ad tech, or media data (campaign delivery, attribution, audience, or revenue reporting) is preferred.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
AI-Native Expectations
The Ads Data Engineering team leverages LLMs to support code generation, analysis, and other use cases. Your experience with AI / LLM usage should include managing code generation with a close eye on quality, standards, and testing, while owning the outputs as your own. Your work with and ability to leverage these tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) will drive your velocity and ability to effectively work within our environment.
We use AI coding tools as a professional standard on this team. In practice:
Daily use — You use AI coding assistants 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, taking on problems that would otherwise require a larger team.
Team leadership — You share what works, automate prompting strategies others can build on, and help teammates earlier in their AI workflow adoption get up to speed.
Continuous learning — The tooling changes fast. You stay current and bring recommendations to the team when something would meaningfully improve how we work.
Our Benefits
Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees). We offer life and disability as well as supplemental plans for medical and dental for Canadian employees.
401(k) plan with company matching program in the US and RRSP with DPSP plan for Canadian employees.
Paid parental leave.
Mental Wellness Program & Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental well-being.
Generous time off: flexible PTO, companywide holidays throughout the year plus summer and winter shutdowns.
Learning & Development programs.
Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment.
Free Life360 Platinum Membership and Tile trackers.
AI Usage: We use AI to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Life360 hiring teams
Life360 Values
Our company’s mission-driven culture is guided by our shared values to create a trusted work environment where you can bring your authentic self to work and make a positive difference
Be a Good Person - We have a team of high integrity people you can trust.
Be Direct With Respect - We communicate directly, even when it’s hard.
Members Before Metrics - We focus on building an exceptional experience for families.
High Intensity, High Impact - We do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Our Commitment to Belonging
Life360 is an equal opportunity employer. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected status. We believe diverse perspectives make us better, and we’re building a workplace that reflects the communities we serve. Don’t meet every qualification? Apply anyway.
#LI-Remote
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