Life360 is hiring a VP of Product Engineering

I’m Chris Hulls, Life360’s CEO, and I’m writing this post because we’re hiring a VP of Product Engineering to join the team. I want to share some perspective around why we are adding this position to our leadership team, as you will be responsible for what is arguably the most critical capability we need to succeed in our next chapter of growth: innovation speed at scale.

Part of the team at our first post-Covid offsite in San Diego

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 over $100m in just a few years.
• We have deep resources at our disposal — over $50m is in the bank and 300+ 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 has advanced exponentially, and we are now the tool 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 months we had a surge in the app stores and reached #1 in over 10 countries around the world, and 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 Product Engineering

As you can see from our highlights, we’re growing very rapidly and we’re operating at a significant scale. If I’m being reflective on what has enabled us to run reliably while dealing with billions of locations points a day hitting our backend, it has been a shift in our team’s core competency from running a “creative process” to a more “factory process.” While both of these skills are important, we’ve probably swung a bit too far to one side and we are specifically opening up this role to find someone who will bring a strong focus on the creative process side of the equation. This means the ideal candidate will be very complementary (vs supplementary) to our CTO, Samir Kapoor, and our other engineering VPs Paul Robinson and Martyn Taylor.

I’d like to give a bit more color on our evolution so I can provide a bit more context around the challenges you will be helping solve. When we started the company a decade ago, the only real skillset in the organization was around the creative process. My co-founder, original CTO, and current board director, Alex Haro, is one of the smartest and scrappiest engineers I know, and between the two of us we built a group of like minded individuals and we got a ton done extremely quickly and for very little money.

As we matured, we went through the standard growing pains for all companies that scale (compounded by the fact that at the time we were young first-time founders) and realized that our innate talents at going from zero to one were not the same as we would need for operational excellence at scale. We still shipped quickly, but the system was brittle and we were constantly firefighting. That is when Samir came in and took the day-to-day reins from Alex and completely transformed how we operate. We now do a great job shipping on time, firefighting is the exception not the norm, and in general we run like a reasonably well oiled machine.

As we now scale to hundreds of engineers and beyond, we want to bring in more talent that will enable us to elevate the creative process skillset we naturally had in our early days, while leveraging the rock solid systems that our now much more mature team has put in place.

The Role

While this is a senior role so we expect you to be well rounded in all areas, the specific areas of emphasis will be on the following three pillars:

Increase Innovation Speed

You will be responsible for constantly increasing the speed we deliver value to our users. Because we have such a strong foundation and backend, you won’t have to worry as much about crashing the system, and you’ll be able to stay focused on finding ways to quickly innovate across our various touch points (primarily mobile, but also the web, wearables, and smart assistants). You will work closely with Corey Bozarth, our VP of Product and Jon Troutman, our VP of Design, to come up with the quickest and simplest ways to deliver value while also ensuring we keep a high bar for quality.

Deliver an Exceptional User Experience

Because the focus of this role is on product engineering, we want someone who constantly thinks about the user and looks for creative ways engineering can contribute to providing an amazing experience for our customers. While we don’t expect you to be a product designer, we want you to help the team develop strong cross functional ties to product, design, and marketing so we can collectively find the most creative and efficient ways to bring ideas to life. Success here means engineering feels responsible not just for delivering features, but having a role in actually defining and creating them.

Build a High Performing Team

Life360 is thinking big. 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 highly ambitious people. 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 energy shines through and will set a high watermark for the team they manage and be a bar raiser for the company as a whole.

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.
• You have demonstrated effectiveness across a broad range of areas: project management, roadmap, objectives management, tools & techniques.
• You know how to create a forward looking plan, create and optimize budgets, and succinctly communicate calibrated trade-offs.

Technical Skills

• You have a strong background in shipping mobile-first consumer products and working closely with Product, Design and Marketing to balance innovation, speed and quality.
• You have proven experience in developing full stack solutions encompassing cloud, iOS, Android and Web tech stacks infused with data analytics.
• You have deep knowledge of the consumer product ecosystem, tools, technologies and frameworks for highly efficient development.
• You can work fluently in shaping the product roadmap seamlessly while driving appropriate tradeoffs between product, engineering and business objectives.

Bonus Points

• You have worked at other companies with a consumer mobile 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

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. 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 US markets next year.

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.