Staff Software Engineer, Search & Investigate

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 Investigate Team develops essential applications that enable customers to engage with Flock’s mission to eliminate crime effectively. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our team to build and maintain our search and sharing data systems. This role is crucial for addressing performance and scaling challenges, resolving technical debt, and modernizing legacy datastores. A successful candidate will quickly learn our data storage landscape and be comfortable working independently and as part of a team to implement changes to our core system.

The Skillset

• Have experience working on search-related features/architecture. Understanding how different databases work will be key in building the next generation of search.

  • Data modeling (relational, document, graph)
  • Storage Retrieval (Hash Indexes, SSTables, LSM-Trees, B-Trees)
  • Encoding (JSON, xml, binary - protocol buffers)
  • Replication and Partitioning
  • Transactions Distributed Systems 

• Comfortable taking on a large scope of work and making architectural decisions

• Background in building scalable, cloud-based solutions 

• Familiarity with search-oriented tooling and technologies 

• Be excited about working on a fast-paced, constantly evolving product. 

Feeling uneasy that you haven’t ticked every box? That’s okay, we’ve felt that way too. Studies have shown women and minorities are less likely to apply unless they meet all qualifications. We encourage you to break the status quo and apply to roles that would make you excited to come to work every day.

90 Days at Flock

We are a results-oriented culture and believe job descriptions are a thing of the past. We prescribe 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 Staff Software Engineer at Flock Safety. 

The First 30 Days

• Onboard and Integrate:
  • Familiarize yourself with the company's mission, products, and development processes.
  • Pair with each engineer on the team to learn about a service we own, and get to know your teammates better
  • Build relationships with key stakeholders in the cloud software organization to understand their needs and expectations. Meeting with a member of the following teams:
    • Data Engineering
    • D&D Realtime, D&D Admin
    • Platform/Pipeline
    • Mobile
• Assess and Analyze:
  • Evaluate the current search and sharing applications to identify performance, scaling, and data modeling issues.
  • Review existing codebase, architecture, and infrastructure to gain a deep understanding of the system.
  • Participate in reviewing teammates' code with an eye towards learning current practices and offering your unique perspective.
• Ship some code
  • Compete a first day push to production
  • Participate in all DDI scrum ceremonies, picking up sprint tickets and working on delivering completed code with assistance from your teammates

The First 60 Days 

• Continued Learning
  • Learn the details of our deployment, monitoring and logging stacks, and suggest improvements to search related metrics or observability.
  • ability to complete larger tasks, spanning multiple repositories with less assistance.
• Improve the quality of code delivered by DDI
  • Prioritize reviewing PRs submitted by your teammates, both to learn our existing patterns and practices and push your peers to use stronger patterns.
  • Establish a habit of running code locally when reviewing PRs that are higher impact or major rewrites. Push for changes and infrastructure that makes this easier for all to accomplish.
• Relationship building
  • Help teach a skill or introduce a new development practice with your teammates

90 Days & Beyond 

• Demonstrate impact to teams outside D&D
  • Represent our team on a cross-functional team project, delivering the needed solutions to support a new feature, and communicate back to your manager and the team any necessary updates.
  • Present recent work in a video demo to be shared with other teams
  • Author an architecture document for a major new feature our team is building
  • -or-
  • Review multiple architecture docs and push for strong patterns, question assumptions, ensure clear vision is articulated
• Communication
  • Participate in one or more customer calls
• Lead our team in improving software quality
  • Propose a solution to a user experience problem you have observed
  • Be aware of newer best practices around the engineering organization and consistently encourage peers to adopt and adhere to these in PR reviews.
• Complete a device installation ride-along

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. 

The Perks 

💰Salary & Equity: In this role, you’ll receive a starting salary of $185,000-$205,000 as well as stock options

🌴Use what you need PTO: We seriously mean it, plus 11 company holidays and your birthday off!

⚕️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.

💚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.

💖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. 

💻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 with Pumpkin to provide insurance for our employee’s fur babies. 

Flock is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diverse backgrounds and thoughts and welcome everyone to apply for employment with us. We are committed to fostering an environment that is inclusive, transparent, and collaborative. Mutual respect is central to how Flock operates, and we believe the best solutions come from diverse perspectives, experiences, and skills. We embrace our differences and know that we are stronger working together.