About The Team
The AI Lab is a small, founder-led team operating like a zero-to-one startup inside Life360, building the company’s next chapter. Our mission is to transform Life360 from the app you open to find your family into an intelligent operating system families rely on daily. We design and build an AI-powered layer on top of our family graph, leveraging our core location technologies and global 100 million-user base to proactively surface what matters across location, schedules, and everyday life.
About the Job
This role is hard to title because the lines between engineering, design, and product blur fast when you are building the way we are building. The closest description is design-oriented builder. You have a strong aesthetic sense and real opinions about how a product should feel. You can take a loose idea and make it tangible before anyone has finished writing the spec. You understand the value of a polished user experience in the context of agentic software and how to deliver one.
You work directly with design, product, and the founder. You are part of the creative process, not downstream of it. The work is not "here is a Figma, build it." The work is "here is a rough idea, what does the first working version look like by the end of day, and what do we learn when we put it in front of someone."
You thrive without traditional specs and get real energy out of shipping something new every day. Energy and momentum matter as much as skill.
What You’ll Do
- Primarily remote with the flexibility to collaborate in-person as business needs and projects require
- Take rough ideas (sketches, voice memos, half-finished docs) and turn them into something real and clickable, fast. The first version is usually the same day.
- Build prototypes for the surfaces that make the product tangible: the map, widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, voice, in-app moments where information surfaces automatically. (These are iOS-native surfaces — you've shipped at least a few of them.)
- Make tasteful UI calls without waiting for design to spec every pixel. Design refines. You get it 80% there.
- Sit in the room when product direction gets debated. Push back when something doesn't feel right. We need engineers who are part of the conversation, not waiting for the output.
- Use AI tooling aggressively. Orchestrate agents to generate code, write tests, and review your work. The whole point of this team is that a small group with the right tools outperforms a much larger one.
- Ship to test groups, watch how people actually use what you built, iterate. The feedback loop is short and you are inside it.
What We’re Looking For
If there's one trait we need above all others, it's self-starter energy. As we've gotten bigger, we've been more open to roles with clearly defined schedules and processes. That doesn't work in a startup. We need people on founder hours, not office hours — with a huge desire to win. You'll be a cofounder of this initiative.
- You operate without a spec. You'd rather have a conversation, a sketch, and 24 hours than a 30-page PRD and a week.
- You ship every day (or close to it). Not "make progress." Ship. Even rough. Even ugly. Momentum matters more than polish at this stage. You're comfortable showing it before it's ready and letting it get torn apart in service of getting to the right thing.
- You push for more. You won't wait to be told what to do. You demand excellence of yourself and the people around you.
- You hold strong opinions and change them when the evidence moves. You push back. You concede fast when wrong.
- You're a customer of what we build. Try it if you haven't.
- Swift is your primary language, but you're comfortable picking up new tools when the product demands it.
The bar
- Deep experience building consumer mobile or web products that real people use. You know what good feels like on a phone, and you know how it fails.
- Zero-to-one stage experience and the desire to do it again.
- Taste. You can articulate why one design works and another doesn't. You have references. You notice details other people miss.
- You can move from a blank screen to a working prototype without anyone holding your hand. Specs make you slower, not faster.
- Deep in Swift and SwiftUI. You know the Apple ecosystem — Apple Foundation Model, App Intent are plus.
- AI-native in your daily workflow. Hands-on with Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent. Deep experience with agentic workflows, prompt engineering, context window management, MCP / function calling.
Bonus
- Map-based or location-driven product work. You understand the design problems unique to spatial UI.