Manager, Engineering (Product)

Company Overview

Flock Freight has been a Certified B Corp since 2020, meeting high social, environmental, transparency, and accountability standards to all of our stakeholders.

Team/Department Overview: Product Engineering Team – Reporting to the Senior Manager of Product Engineering.

Flock Freight is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a Product Engineering team responsible for the shipper and carrier applications and core workflows that power the freight experience. You will lead an established team of seven engineers, including five Staff Engineers, overseeing end-to-end delivery while providing the technical guidance needed to navigate complex engineering decisions.

This is a people-leadership role first, with a strong emphasis on coaching, developing, and empowering an experienced engineering team. You’ll foster collaboration, elevate team performance, and partner with Product, Design, Operations, and Engineering leadership to deliver reliable software that shippers, carriers, and Flock teams depend on every day.

While you won't be writing production code every day, you'll remain actively involved in architectural discussions, technical decision-making, and engineering execution. You'll work alongside experienced engineers to evaluate tradeoffs, remove obstacles, and ensure the team delivers scalable, maintainable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop an established team of seven engineers, including Staff-level technical leaders, through meaningful coaching, regular 1:1s, constructive feedback, performance management, and individualized career development.
• Own engineering execution and delivery, partnering with Product to translate business priorities into achievable milestones, navigate changing requirements, manage competing priorities, and consistently deliver meaningful customer and business outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Operations to translate customer and business goals into a clear technical roadmap.
• Provide technical leadership by guiding architectural discussions, challenging assumptions, and helping experienced engineers navigate decisions involving infrastructure, system design, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Keep production healthy by establishing strong ownership, on-call practices, incident response, observability, and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Identify opportunities to improve engineering effectiveness, developer productivity, and software quality through thoughtful improvements to testing, CI/CD, documentation, collaboration, and emerging development tools.
• Support hiring and onboarding as the team evolves, helping attract strong engineering talent while prioritizing the development and effectiveness of the existing team.
• Address team conflict, collaboration challenges, and performance concerns directly, fairly, and early, creating clarity around expectations and supporting people toward successful outcomes..
• Balance new product work against technical debt and reliability investments, making tradeoffs visible to stakeholders.
• Define and track meaningful measures of team success, including delivery predictability, product quality, operational health, team effectiveness, and business impact. Use these measures to identify risks, guide improvements, and communicate progress.
• Communicate clearly up, down, and across the organization so the team understands its goals, priorities, tradeoffs, decisions, and the customer and business outcomes behind the work.
• Partner with fellow engineering leaders to strengthen Flock’s engineering culture, operating practices, and technical standards, creating greater consistency and effectiveness across teams.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong senior-level technical expertise or equivalent technical leadership experience.
• 1–2 + years of demonstrated people leadership experience, whether through formal engineering management or meaningful responsibility for coaching, mentoring, developing engineers, and contributing to team performance.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A genuine passion for developing engineers at different career stages, including experienced technical contributors, and creating an environment where collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning thrive.
• Proven ability to navigate team conflict, resolve challenges constructively, and implement lasting process improvements.
• Strong project-management skills: defining MVPs with Product, decomposing work into iterative deliverables, running an effective agile or iterative process, and keeping delivery on track.
• Strong technical grounding in backend and web application development, with experience in modern technologies and frameworks. Flock’s Product Engineering stack currently emphasizes Java, Spring, Typescript and React.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architectural decisions, challenge technical assumptions, and mentor experienced engineers while remaining focused on people leadership rather than day-to-day coding.
• The technical credibility to engage in code reviews, design discussions, and engineering problem-solving while providing constructive guidance to engineers across different experience levels.
• Experience partnering with Product and non-technical stakeholders to set priorities, negotiate scope, and make decisions under uncertainty.
• Experience hiring, training, and developing engineers at multiple levels, including designing effective onboarding.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate team conflict, resolve challenges constructively, and drive sustainable process improvements.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical tradeoffs into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience thriving in smaller, agile, or rapidly evolving engineering environments where adaptability, broad technical exposure, resourcefulness, and a willingness to take ownership are essential.

Compensation

The expected range for this position is $180,000 - $205,000 per year. This reflects typical earning potential in this role based on market data and individual factors including skill sets, experience, and geographic location. In addition to salary, full-time employees are eligible for an equity package and competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Flock Freight. We target candidates local or willing to relocate to Flock Freight’s San Diego headquarters.

Life & Benefits of the Flock:

• Hybrid Work Model: As an organization we value in-office collaboration, working cross-functionally, and winning together. Through scheduled in-office and work from home days, we are able to work more efficiently and collaboratively. (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday in-Office)
• 401(k): We know Flock may just be a stepping stone in your epic journey, but we want to be sure you’re setting your future self up for success!
• Medical, Dental & Vision: Generous coverage for employees and dependents. Both HMO and PPO options provided.

Our Promise To You:
Flock Freight is committed to creating an environment that’s fair and inclusive. We fill our open positions based on qualifications, merit, and business needs. We value the skills of people from all backgrounds and are proud to hire, promote, and retain talent from a diverse candidate pool. Diverse perspectives are central to innovation at Flock Freight and make our team better. We're interested in your inherent abilities, not just the skills you bring from your last role - if you think you have what it takes to succeed in the role but don't check every box, please still get in touch. We'd love to start a conversation with you.

Flock Freight has zero tolerance for behavior that negatively impacts marginalized groups, including women, people of color, veterans, immigrants, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. We invite people of all identities to join the Flock!

We are targeting talent in the San Diego/Encinitas and Los Angeles area.