Manager, Engineering (Product)

Flock Freight • Encinitas, CA

10h • $180,000 - $205,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Flock Freight is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead an established Product Engineering team of seven engineers, including five Staff Engineers. The team is responsible for shipper and carrier applications and the core workflows that power the freight experience. Reporting to the Senior Manager of Product Engineering, this is primarily a people-leadership role focused on coaching, developing, and empowering an experienced team while overseeing end-to-end engineering delivery.

The manager will partner with Product, Design, Operations, and Engineering leadership to turn customer and business goals into a technical roadmap and reliable software. Although the role does not involve writing production code every day, it remains actively engaged in architectural discussions, technical decisions, and engineering execution, helping the team assess tradeoffs, remove obstacles, and deliver scalable, maintainable solutions.

Flock Freight is a U.S. Shared Truckload freight brokerage using AI-powered, patented pooling technology to combine shipments across its customer network. The company has been a Certified B Corp since 2020. The role is intended for candidates in or willing to relocate to the San Diego headquarters area, with a hybrid work model involving scheduled in-office and work-from-home days.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, with strong senior-level technical expertise or equivalent technical leadership experience.
• At least 1–2 years of demonstrated people leadership experience, 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.
• Ability and genuine interest in developing engineers at different career stages, including experienced technical contributors, and fostering collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Ability to navigate team conflict, resolve challenges constructively, and implement lasting process improvements.
• Strong project-management skills, including 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 and experience with modern technologies and frameworks.
• Strong technical judgment to guide architectural decisions, challenge technical assumptions, and mentor experienced engineers while focusing on people leadership rather than day-to-day coding.
• Technical credibility to participate in code reviews, design discussions, and engineering problem-solving, and provide constructive guidance to engineers at 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.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in smaller, agile, or rapidly evolving engineering environments requiring adaptability, broad technical exposure, resourcefulness, and ownership.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Flock Freight’s Product Engineering technologies: Java, Spring, TypeScript, and React.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of seven engineers, including Staff-level technical leaders, through coaching, regular 1:1s, constructive feedback, performance management, and individualized career development.
• Own engineering execution and delivery, partnering with Product to turn business priorities into achievable milestones, manage changing requirements and competing priorities, and deliver customer and business outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Operations to translate customer and business goals into a clear technical roadmap.
• Guide architectural discussions, challenge assumptions, and help engineers navigate decisions involving infrastructure, system design, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Maintain production health through strong ownership, on-call practices, incident response, observability, and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Improve engineering effectiveness, developer productivity, and software quality through improvements to testing, CI/CD, documentation, collaboration, and development tools.
• Support hiring and onboarding as the team evolves, while prioritizing development and effectiveness of the existing team.
• Address team conflict, collaboration challenges, and performance concerns directly, fairly, and early; clarify expectations and support people toward successful outcomes.
• Balance new product work against technical debt and reliability investments, making tradeoffs visible to stakeholders.
• Define and track measures of team success, including delivery predictability, product quality, operational health, team effectiveness, and business impact; use them to identify risks, guide improvements, and communicate progress.
• Communicate the team’s goals, priorities, tradeoffs, decisions, and the customer and business outcomes behind its work across the organization.
• Partner with engineering leaders to strengthen engineering culture, operating practices, and technical standards across teams.

Benefits

• Equity package for full-time employees.
• 401(k).
• Medical insurance, with HMO and PPO options and coverage for employees and dependents.
• Dental insurance, with coverage for employees and dependents.
• Vision insurance, with coverage for employees and dependents.
• Hybrid work model with scheduled in-office and work-from-home days.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager