Software Engineering Manager, Video Streaming

Who is Flock?

Flock Safety is an all-in-one technology solution to eliminate crime and keep communities safe. Our intelligent platform combines the power of communities at scale - including cities, businesses, schools, and law enforcement agencies - to shape a safer future together. Our full-service, maintenance-free technology solution is trusted by communities across the country to help solve and deter crime in the pursuit of safer communities for everyone.

Our holistic public safety platform is comprehensive and intelligent, providing the actionable evidence needed to solve, deter and reduce crime across neighborhoods, schools, businesses and entire cities. Without compromising transparency or privacy, we are turning unbiased data into objective answers.

Flock strives to offer a career-defining experience where you can also make an impact on your community. While safety is a serious business, we are a supportive team that is optimizing the remote experience to create strong and fulfilling relationships even when we are physically apart. Our group of hard-working employees thrive in a positive and inclusive environment, where a bias towards action is rewarded. 

We have raised over $500M in venture capital from investors including Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and Initialized Capital. Now surpassing a $5.5B valuation, Flock is scaling intentionally and seeking the best and brightest to help us meet our goal of reducing crime in the United States by 25% in the next three years.

The Opportunity 

The Cloud Video team at Flock, manages the overall ingestion and display of live video from a variety of sources. The team is looking to add a Software Engineering Manager to support our increasing number of integrations with other NVRs (network video recorders), VMS (video management systems), and video-capable devices, including drones. 

The team needs strong leadership as it navigates these challenges.  The ability to juggle a lot of complex technologies and capabilities while keeping the team focused, motivated, and growing is paramount.  An engineering manager has a unique capability to help technically, build the team for continued success, and remove organizational roadblocks.

The Skillset 

• Love writing code and continue learning to do it better
• Proven strong leadership skills and confident in leading staff engineers
• Coach direct reports to have a highly productive team and grow their individual careers
• Inspire and motivate direct reports to build quality software and cultivate a winning mentality where directs are excited by the opportunity.
• Motivated by taking an unknown problem, sinking your teeth in, and coming up with a plan of attack
• Desire to grow your role and directly influence the growth of a young company
• Excited about working on a fast-paced, constantly evolving product
• Confident with Go, Typescript (Node) as web services in addition to general API design
• Familiar with various data stores and know how to interact with them. Confident in SQL
• Familiar with Docker and how to run locally and deploy remotely via Helm to Kubernetes
• Familiar with AWS and have used some managed services like S3, API Gateway, SQS, etc.
• Nive to have: experience with streaming technologies such as WebRTC, HLS, FFMPEG, Gstreamer, etc.

90 Days at Flock

We are a results-oriented culture and believe job descriptions are a thing of the past. We prescribe to 90 day plans and believe that good days lead to good weeks, which lead to good months. This serves as a preview of the 90 day plan you will receive if you were to be hired as a Software Engineering Manager at Flock Safety. 

The First 30 Days

• Understand current processes and procedures: Driving standups; deepdives with senior engineers on overall product responsibility
• Meetings with your PMs / Meetings with your directs
• Pair with engineers on small tasks for the sprint with support, to better understand the code and understand how the devs work
• Work towards understanding Video Products and codebase 
• Asking questions in a public way to spread knowledge; i.e. public slack channels
• Meet with peers to understand how Flock Engineering works, and how to navigate

The First 60 Days 

• Ability to perform role with decreased need for guidance
  • Take ownership of team with fully taking on 1:1 meetings with directs, sprint ceremonies, and project meetings
• High level understanding of the features we are working on, all OKRs that your teams play a role to complete, roadmap, support, and on call
• Understand the software design philosophies being used by the video team
• Be able to navigate through the code bases your teams own
• Engaged during technical conversations to increase quality of input
• Making decisions on technical/product features 

90 Days & Beyond 

• Understand the Flock career path, and where your team members fit into that
• Ability to perform role with little guidance with transparency
• Able to participate and have questions and answers to road mapping and OKR planning activities for your teams
• Communicating across multiple teams to solve problems efficiently
• Have ideas of dependencies that might affect your teams, and what they own
• Contributing ideas for how we build better software
• Able to give good feedback to your team members, and have idea of where they need to grow, and know their strengths
• Continue to contribute code each sprint

The Interview Process 

We want our interview process to be a true reflection of our culture: transparent and collaborative. Throughout the interview process, your recruiter will guide you through the next steps and ensure you feel prepared every step of the way. 

1. Our First Chat: During this first conversation, you’ll meet with a recruiter to chat through your background, what you could bring to Flock, what you are looking for in your next role, and who we are. 
2. The Hiring Manager Interview: You will meet with your potential future boss to really dive into the role, the team, expectations, and what success means at Flock. This is your chance to really nerd out with someone in your field. 
3. The Technical Assessment: Our technical assessments seek to test the hard skills required to do the job. Engineers may find themselves in coding interviews or architecture discussions, sales roles may present mock discovery calls, and leadership roles may craft 90 day plans. Your recruiter will inform you of which assessment you will be assigned and ensure you are fully prepared for your big day. 
4. The Panel: Learn more about the team, responsibilities, and workflows. You should be prepared to speak about past projects, how you collaborate and communicate with others, and how you live our values. Depending on the team and role you are interviewing for, you may meet with several teammates as well as cross-functional partners. 
5. The Executive Review: A chance to meet an executive in your function and view Flock from a different lens. Be prepared to ask well-thought-out questions about the company, culture, and more. 
6. Culture Review: A final opportunity to meet with the Chief People Officer and the CTO.

Salary & Equity

In this role, you’ll receive a starting salary of $180,000-$250,000 as well as stock options.

The Perks 

🌴Flexible PTO: We seriously mean it, plus 11 company holidays.

⚕️Fully-paid health benefits** plan for employees**: including Medical, Dental, and Vision and an HSA match. 

👪Family Leave: All employees receive 12 weeks of 100% paid parental leave. Birthing parents are eligible for an additional 6-8 weeks of physical recovery time.

🍼Fertility & Family Benefits: We have partnered with Maven, a complete digital health benefit for starting and raising a family. In 2024, Flock will provide a $ 50,000-lifetime maximum benefit related to eligible adoption, surrogacy, or fertility expenses.

🧠Mental Health: All employees receive an annual subscription to Headspace.

💖Caregiver Support: We have partnered with Cariloop to provide our employees with caregiver support 

💸Carta Tax Advisor: Employees receive 1:1 sessions with Equity Tax Advisors who can address individual grants, model tax scenarios, and answer general questions. 

💚ERGs: We want all employees to thrive and feel like they belong at Flock. We offer three ERGs today - Women of Flock, Flock Proud, and Melanin Motion. If you are interested in talking to a representative from one of these, please let your recruiter know.

💻WFH Stipend: $150 per month to cover the costs of working from home.

📚Productivity Stipend: $250 per year to use on Audible, Calm, Masterclass, Duolingo, Grammarly and so much more.

🏠Home Office Stipend: A one-time $750 to help you create your dream office.

🐾Pet Insurance: We’ve partnered withPumpkin to provide insurance for our employee’s fur babies.