Life360 is Hiring a VP of Cloud Engineering

Hi, I’m Chris Hulls, Life360’s CEO and I’m writing this post because we’re hiring a new VP to join our leadership team to take responsibility for cloud engineering. While you’ll be reporting to our CTO, Samir Kapoor, I want to personally share some perspective on the role because it is one of the most important additions we are making to the team, and the scope of responsibility extends far beyond just the core nuts and bolts of our technology.

(Some our engineering team, with Samir on the right)

The Life360 Elevator Pitch

Before I get into details, I’ll start with the quick elevator pitch. If Facebook is for friends and LinkedIn is for professionals, we are the same thing for families, but with a strong focus on safety and coordination. With features that range from location sharing and place notifications to automatic car crash detection and emergency dispatch (on average, we send an ambulance to an accident every hour), Life360 is used by tens of millions of families around the world to make life safer and easier.

While the Facebook for Families pitch isn’t new, we have the stats to back it up. Some examples:

• One in 10 families with kids in the US use our product everyday, and we have over 30 million active users worldwide.
• Beyond just having amazing market fit, we have an exceptional attachment rate to premium of 14% — and our revenue run rate has gone from ~$1m to $100m in just a few years.
• We have deep resources at our disposal — over $50m is in the bank and 275 members on the team.

We’re also very well positioned to benefit from the changes that have happened over the last year in the pandemic era. In the same way that Zoom benefited from everyone staying at home, we are seeing a boost as the world returns to normal. Comfort and familiarity with digital tools to stay connected have advanced exponentially, and we are now the service of choice for this connection when family members are apart. And, the world is more anxious in general, and Life360 enables parents to give their children the independence to roam freely without having to worry that they are safe.

As a result, in the last few weeks we had surge in the app stores and reached #1 in over 10 countries around the world. Also, Randi Zuckerberg recently joined our Board because she saw the parallels between us and Facebook in 2007 just before they broke out of the college niche into the mainstream.

Why we are Hiring a VP of Cloud Engineering

This brings me to why we are hiring for this role — given our momentum, we are planning ahead for more success, more scale, more features, more people. And for this position in particular, we are looking for you to drive impact in four ways: technical, team, execution, and strategy.

Technical:

From a technical aspect, I’ll keep it high level — you’ll learn more in the interview process, but basically while we look like a mobile app, under the hood we are so much more. Although we “only” have 30 million active users, our infrastructure needs to support 10x the volume of most apps our size, because unlike most products which only worry about their backends when they are being used, we run in the background 24/7 and have to continually keep our connections alive and transmit location data throughout the day. For reference, our platform processes over 10 billion location data points a day and we collect over 200 billion miles of driving data annually (approximately 10% of all miles driven in the US!).

And because we aren’t just an app, but rather a life safety service, bugs take on a different meaning and we and our members hold Life360 to a higher standard. The stakes are different when an outage means an ambulance isn’t dispatched vs. a photo not going through. Trust, reliability, security and quality are crucial.

We also have a much bigger vision to expand the platform to open up our API to others so they can access our Family Graph and plug in a whole range of products into our system. For two examples, check out what we did with Google Assistant to power their family features, and our recent announcement of our proposed acquisition of Jiobit. We want people who get excited about how big we are thinking and have the background to support this growth.

Team:

Although our app is for families, we as a company are more like a professional sports team. We are a highly ambitious company, and we want equally ambitious people on the team. Sometimes as companies grow, the rest and vest mentality creeps in — we are looking to find leaders that will be fanatical about never letting this happen. A huge portion of this role will be ensuring you build a team of A players, with the right person at the right time for each role. Because people emulate their leaders, we want someone whose drive shines through and will set a high watermark for the team they manage and be a bar raiser for the company as a whole.

Execution:

As a founder/CEO, I’ve seen Life360 through different phases. At times, we have been the scrappy zero-to-one startup that moves fast and breaks things. I’ve also overseen transitions to having heavier processes to ensure mission critical things like location don’t break. When we look at the company today, we’re in a transition zone and are trying to find the right balance between speed/innovation and operational excellence at scale.

I often see team members struggle when they are too firmly rooted in a playbook that is based on the last companies they were at, vs. being more nimble about understanding the specific needs of where we specifically are today. The oversimplified fail case is a startup person only being able to be scrappy and missing the importance of process and rigor, or on the other extreme the big company mentality of ongoing checks and balances that reduce risk while unintentionally stifling innovation.

We’re looking for a leader who has been through these similar growth phases and is able to straddle the startup and mature company mindsets. Success here means three things: a) respect for both the big and small company ways of doing things b) the development of team of diverse individuals who in aggregate bring a well rounded set of skills to the table and c) the ability to run at different speeds based on the projects at hand.

Strategy:

While the focus of this role is engineering, we do want someone who has a high degree of business maturity, and always centers their decision making around the end needs of our customers. As part of our leadership team, we want someone who develops strong cross functional relationships with their peers — namely in product and marketing — and will work with them to understand how engineering can help accelerate our overall plans. Related to the execution point above, by having a strong hand in strategy, you will be better informed on how to set up each project for success — with some being done with an eye towards scrappy experimentation and limited documentation, but with others going through a rigorous process to ensure we can deliver on complex cross functional heavy lift projects in ways that are seamless to the user.

Who You’ll be Working With

Because we’re so focused on the team, we’re really proud of the group we’ve assembled, and want to share the key leaders across the organization you’ll be working with day to day. As I already shared, I’m Chris Hulls, Cofounder and CEO, and you’ll report to Samir Kapoor, our CTO. You’ll be peers with Paul Robinson (VP of Mobile Engineering) and Corey Bozarth (VP of Product). Key leaders on your team are Chris Robertson (Head of Cloud Operations) and Rajeev Dujari (Head of Cloud). You’ll also interact quite a bit with Jonathan Benassaya, our CPO.

Who You Are

Leadership

• You are an organized self starter and don’t wait to be told what to do. You will be part of our leadership team and thus need to be part of defining your own success.
• You are someone known to raise the bar and have extremely high expectations for the people on your team.
• You are skilled at hiring, building and mentoring world class teams to 50 and beyond and have managed through managers across multiple teams/geos and know how to develop leaders in a fast growth environment.
• You bias to speed and action, and push your team to find creative ways to do more with less and have a fight to win.
• You have demonstrated effectiveness across a broad range of areas: project management, roadmap, objectives management, tools & techniques.
• You have operated at or significantly above Life360’s current scale of operations and managed a multi-million dollar tools and technology budget.
• You know how to create a forward looking plan, create and optimize budgets, and succinctly communicate trade-offs calibrated with your technical judgement.

Technical Skills

• You have strong technical roots and background in development of complex backend system software, distributed systems engineering and IT.
• You have proven experience with high volume, high throughput systems.
• You have deep knowledge of the cloud ecosystem, technologies, tools and frameworks for high performance, reliability and speed of development.
• You are comfortable in a 100% cloud native environment and fluent in AWS.
• You can define the technical roadmap for cloud in concert with other tech stacks (mobile, data, web), product and business objectives.
• You understand how to build resilient, scalable, and secure infrastructure (three 9’s or better).

Bonus Points

• You have worked in other tech companies with a B2C focus so you can resonate with the overall setup of our organization.
• You have been a senior engineering leader as part of a company that has scaled from ~200 to 400+ people.
• You are an active user of our product, so you intuitively understand the value we are providing to our customers.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for employees)
• 401(k) plan with company matching program
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental wellness.
• Flexible PTO and 12 company wide days off throughout the year
• Learning & Development programs
• Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment
• Free Life360 Platinum Membership for your preferred circle

Other Details

Although we are headquartered in SF we have embraced the remote-first world, so we are open to hiring the right person wherever they might be located. We would expect you to come to HQ regularly though, and you would need to be able work during business hours in our time zone.

We offer competitive benefits and compensation, and are publicly listed on the ASX (Australian Stock Exchange). We chose this non-traditional funding route instead of doing a late-stage private round because you get the liquidity of a public company with the upside of a private one. Our equity is no longer the proverbial lottery ticket — you can sell shares whenever you want. We plan to move back to a US exchange in the next two years.

Interested in learning more?

The world is small, so ideally you come in through a trusted referral, but feel free to apply here if we don’t happen to have any connections that intersect.