Manager, Engineering (Product)

Flock Freight • Encinitas, CA

19h • Hybrid

About The Position

Flock Freight is hiring an Engineering Manager for its Product Engineering team, reporting to the Senior Manager of Product Engineering. The manager will lead an established team of seven engineers, including five Staff Engineers, responsible for shipper and carrier applications and core workflows that power the freight experience. This is primarily a people-leadership role focused on coaching, developing, and empowering an experienced engineering team, fostering collaboration, and elevating team performance.

The manager will oversee end-to-end engineering delivery and partner with Product, Design, Operations, and Engineering leadership to deliver reliable software. They will remain actively involved in architectural discussions, technical decisions, and engineering execution, helping evaluate tradeoffs, remove obstacles, and ensure the team delivers scalable, maintainable solutions. Flock Freight targets candidates in the San Diego/Encinitas and Los Angeles areas, with candidates local to or willing to relocate to its San Diego headquarters.

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.
• Strong project-management skills, including defining MVPs with Product, breaking 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.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to guide architectural decisions, challenge technical assumptions, and mentor experienced engineers while prioritizing people leadership over day-to-day coding.
• Technical credibility to engage in code reviews, design discussions, and engineering problem-solving, and to provide constructive guidance across 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.
• Ability to navigate team conflict, resolve challenges constructively, and drive sustainable process improvements.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining 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 Java, Spring, TypeScript, and React, which are emphasized in Flock Freight’s Product Engineering stack.

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 translate 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 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 the development and effectiveness of the existing team.
• Address team conflict, collaboration challenges, and performance concerns directly and fairly, clarifying expectations and supporting successful outcomes.
• Balance new product work with 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 goals, priorities, tradeoffs, decisions, and customer and business outcomes clearly throughout the organization.
• Partner with fellow engineering leaders to strengthen engineering culture, operating practices, and technical standards across teams.

Benefits

• Equity package for full-time employees.
• Hybrid work model with scheduled in-office and work-from-home days; Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are in-office days.
• 401(k).
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, with HMO and PPO options.

What This Job Offers

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