Flock Freight is looking for an experienced engineer who is passionate about building the infrastructure that enables the architecture, development, deployment, and observation of highly performant frontend and backend applications. This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure and product, building platforms and services used by Flock engineers every day. You will operate with a strong product mindset, partnering directly with engineers to improve developer experience, velocity, and system reliability.

Role Overview

The Developer Effectiveness (DevFX) team empowers the rest of the Technology organization to ship high‑quality code as fast and safely as possible to make the freight world a better place. We are responsible for the core software development lifecycle (SDLC) tooling and platforms that underpin how engineers build, test, deploy, and operate software every day.

We’re looking for an exceptional, collaborative software engineer to join the team responsible for building out a set of core infrastructure, services, and best practices for our Product and Algorithms Engineers. Our team is made up of a small group of engineers who are passionate about creating innovative solutions built with modern technology. As a member of this team, your talent and expertise will influence the best practices, design patterns, and technologies that we use to deliver the best experience for our customers.

Team/Department Overview: Infrastructure Engineering – Reporting to the Director of Infrastructure Engineering

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain shared services and frameworks for standing up workloads, managing transactions, caching, queueing, asynchronous processing, data pipelines, observability, authentication and authorization.
• Contribute to and evolve our Java-based identity and authentication services, which power critical product-facing functionality.
• Partner closely with internal engineering teams as customers to identify friction points and deliver scalable platform solutions that improve developer productivity.
• Design and evolve our deployable architecture and SDLC pipelines (e.g., Terraform on GCP and AWS, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio) to ensure frictionless delivery and operation of product functionality.
• Build internal tools to increase engineering productivity and grow our DevOps culture.
• Drive standardization of production observability by building tools to measure, monitor and optimize our backend performance and ensure high availability.
• Grow visibility into our platform by designing and integrating monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions used across engineering teams.
• Define and evangelize best practices for development and SDLC topics such as database access, asynchronous messaging, decomposition, dependency injection, integration and end‑to‑end testing of microservices.
• Build and maintain software delivery systems from local tooling for building and managing software, through continuous integration, all the way to production deployments and post‑deployment verification.
• Collaborate with software engineers to ensure new features and functionality are supported by our infrastructure and validate their scalability, reliability, and security requirements.
• Participate in the full SDLC in a fast‑paced, dynamic, truly agile workflow; work both independently and in a highly collaborative environment.
• Take part in the interviewing and consideration of potential new team members.
• Provide guidance and technical mentorship to new Flockers.

Qualifications

• B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent, with 5+ years of experience in a software engineering role.
• Prior experience working on an infrastructure, platform, or developer experience (DevEx) team is required.
• Experience using popular Java backend development frameworks like Spring Boot, and persistence layer frameworks such as Hibernate and JPA.
• Comfortable operating as a generalist across platform infrastructure, internal tooling, and select product-facing services.
• Proven ability to operate in environments without dedicated product managers, including defining problems, prioritizing work, and driving solutions independently.
• 3+ years of experience with public cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web services (AWS), Azure, or equivalent, with PaaS offerings for Kubernetes, hosted MySQL, and more.
• Excellent knowledge of Java, Kotlin, Python, or Go, with understanding of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
• Experience with build tools such as Gradle, Maven, Bazel, or equivalent.
• 3+ years of experience building distributed systems leveraging asynchronous messaging (Pub/Sub), caching, RPC, and the common services and technologies used to build cohesive solutions.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems including process management, networking fundamentals, containerization, and etc.
• Experience maintaining infrastructure as code using tools like Terraform, Helm, Kustomize, or equivalent.
• Experience with monitoring technologies like Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus or equivalent, in order to accomplish end‑to‑end debugging, monitoring and alerting, performance tuning, and system health analysis.
• Experience with modern web stacks and architecture (REST, load balancing, HTTP(S), authentication).
• Experience in state‑of‑the‑art software and system design patterns.
• Exceptional problem solving, analysis, decomposition, and communication skills applied within an agile development environment.
• Enthusiasm to tackle challenging problems – if you see something broken you can’t help but try to fix it.
• Enthusiasm to leverage cutting edge GenAI technology.
• Enthusiasm to operate in a startup environment.

Differentiators

• Deep understanding of modern SDLC and DevOps best practices, including CI/CD pipeline design, trunk‑based development, and the testing pyramid (unit, integration, and end‑to‑end tests) to enable fast, safe, and repeatable delivery.
• Experience applying industry best practices for safe deployment and operations, such as incremental rollout strategies (feature flags, blue/green, canary), clear rollback patterns, environment parity, and data‑driven improvement using observability and deployment metrics (e.g., failure rates, lead time, MTTR).
• Understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles, including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and post‑incident reviews, with hands‑on experience designing resilient systems (capacity planning, graceful degradation, backoff/retry patterns) and using observability data (metrics, logs, traces) to continually improve reliability and reduce MTTR.
• Strong grasp of modern application and infrastructure security practices, including secure SDLC (threat modeling, secure code review, dependency and container scanning), least‑privilege access and secrets management, and hardening of CI/CD and runtime environments hands‑on experience with identity and access protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, and SCIM when integrating or designing authentication/authorization flows.

  Compensation

  The expected salary range for this position is $150,000 - $168,000 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.
    • 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!

    Talent in San Diego/Encinitas or nearby cities is preferred.