Engineering Manager, Mulitimodal Modeling

Who is Flock? Every community deserves to be safe, it’s a fundamental right. Our mission is simple - to build technology that reduces crime and protects privacy. Flock partners with cities, businesses, schools, and neighborhoods to help protect where people live, work, and play. Last year, Flock technology supported over 1 million criminal investigations. We've also helped solve approximately 20% of reported crimes in areas where we're deployed, and have played a role in locating more than 10,000 missing people. We are a high-performance team united by urgency, ownership, and a shared commitment to meaningful impact. The work is fast-paced and the expectations are high. We push beyond perceived limits, support each other, and hold ourselves accountable to delivering results that matter. With over $1B in funding and an $8.3B valuation, we are scaling with intention and investing in the people who will help us build what others said could not be done. At Flock, you will find the opportunity to grow quickly, take on real responsibility, and contribute to something bigger than yourself. The Opportunity As an Engineering Manager, Multimodal ML, you will lead a team of high-performing engineers responsible for advancing Flock's core multimodal search and retrieval systems. Your team builds and maintains the embedding models that power image-to-vector pipelines, embedding storage and retrieval infrastructure, and cross-modal search capabilities enabling both image and text queries. You will also oversee the moderation model that ensures safe and appropriate query handling across our search products. You will set the technical direction and execution strategy for multimodal model development, evaluation, deployment, and lifecycle management — ensuring our retrieval systems deliver fast, accurate, and scalable search experiences. As a people leader, you will be responsible for hiring, mentoring, and growing a strong, mission-driven engineering team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning. In close partnership with product, search, and platform teams, you'll align roadmap priorities with business impact while empowering your team to execute effectively. Your leadership will be central to Flock's ability to deliver state-of-the-art vision-language systems that power critical public safety workflows. You will also: Lead and grow a high-performing Multimodal ML team — hiring top talent, developing engineers' careers, and building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement. Manage competing workstreams across model development, production reliability, and moderation — prioritizing effectively and ensuring the team delivers on the highest-impact work. Guide the development and improvement of multimodal models for image-text and image-to-image embeddings, ensuring high-quality modality alignment and retrieval performance. Oversee the full ML lifecycle for multimodal systems — data strategy, training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, vector storage, deployment, monitoring, and retrieval — ensuring scalable, reliable production systems. Drive innovation in cross-modal search capabilities, extending support to new data sources (e.g., drone video, mobile LPR imagery) and evolving product needs. Own the moderation model, ensuring query handling meets safety and appropriateness standards across search products. Own production reliability for the multimodal search pipeline, including incident response, on-call processes, and service-level commitments. Balance forward-looking innovation with maintenance and operational excellence, proactively addressing model drift, embedding quality degradation, and system reliability. Partner cross-functionally with product, search, data engineering, and platform teams to translate business priorities into a clear technical roadmap and deliver high-impact multimodal capabilities. Mentor and develop engineers through technical leadership, code reviews, architectural guidance, structured feedback, and regular performance cycles — fostering individual growth and long-term career development. The Skillset 3+ years of engineering management experience leading Machine Learning teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineers. 7+ years of industry experience in Machine Learning, with strong familiarity with computer vision, multimodal modeling, or embedding-based retrieval systems. Demonstrated experience managing competing workstreams — balancing innovation, production reliability, and maintenance across multiple concurrent initiatives. Experience running structured performance cycles, including goal-setting, regular feedback, calibration, and career development conversations. Proven ability to hire effectively — sourcing, interviewing, calibrating, and closing candidates for technical ML roles. Strong technical foundation in Python and modern ML workflows, with enough depth to evaluate architectural decisions, review code, and guide experimentation strategy. Experience owning production ML systems end-to-end, including deployment, monitoring, incident response, and iterative improvement. Familiarity with classification or content moderation systems, including understanding of safety filtering, policy enforcement, and evaluation of model outputs. Comfortable partnering cross-functionally with product, search, data engineering, and platform teams to align roadmap priorities with business impact. Hands-on experience with multimodal models (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP, BLIP), including fine-tuning, evaluation, and failure analysis. Deep familiarity with embedding-based retrieval concepts, including contrastive learning, cross-modal alignment, and evaluation methods for vector similarity search. Experience with embedding storage and retrieval infrastructure at scale, such as vector search built on columnar databases (e.g., Clickhouse) or purpose-built vector stores (e.g., FAISS, Weaviate, Pinecone). Experience with model compression techniques (e.g., distillation, quantization, pruning) to improve inference efficiency and deployability at scale. Exposure to multi-GPU or distributed training workflows for scaling training of large multimodal models. Experience scaling teams through periods of rapid product growth. 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 because we 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 are hired in this role. The First 30 Days Establish relationships with your team and who they work with, understanding the product, ongoing projects, and what success looks like Pair with your team to get a hands-on overview of the end-to-end R&D lifecycle for multimodal models. Lead project management for the team Get involved with recruiting for your team by participating in interviews The First 60 Days Lead how the production inference pipeline and search backend work. Work on a project as an individual contributor to get first hand experience of the R&D experience and how to improve it for your team. Identify and resolve technical or process inefficiencies to improve team velocity and system reliability. 90 Days & Beyond Mentor reports on breaking down complex initiatives into clear plans with well-scoped milestones. Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the model lifecycle, including data curation, evaluation, and deployment. Lead quarterly planning to align team priorities with business impact and complete your first team performance review cycle. Salary & Equity In this role, you’ll receive a starting salary between $200,000 and $220,000 as well as Flock Safety Stock Options. Base salary is determined by job-related experience, education/training, as well as market indicators. Your recruiter will discuss this in-depth with you during our first chat. Location We’re building the impossible, together. To drive innovation through in-person collaboration, we’re prioritizing candidates in our key hubs: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Austin. While we value the energy of our hub communities, we embrace remote work and welcome applications from exceptional talent across the United States. The Perks 🌴 Flexible PTO : We offer non-accrual PTO, 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. Flock will provide a $50,000-lifetime maximum benefit related to eligible adoption, surrogacy, or fertility expenses. 🧠 Spring Health: Spring Health offers a variety of mental health benefits, including therapy, coaching, medication management, and digital tools, all tailored to each individual's needs. 💖 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 four ERGs today - Women of Flock, Flock Proud, LEOs 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: $300 per year to use on Audible, Calm, Masterclass, Duolingo and so much more. 🏠Home Office Stipend: A one-time $750 to help you create your dream office. If an offer is extended and accepted, this position requires the ability to obtain and maintain Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) certification as a condition of employment. Applicants must meet all FBI CJIS Security Policy requirements, including a fingerprint-based background check. 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. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at [email protected]. This information will be treated as confidential and used only to determine an appropriate accommodation for the interview process. At Flock, we compensate our employees fairly for their work. Base salary is determined by job-related experience, education/training, as well as market indicators. The range above is representative of base salary only and does not include equity, sales bonus plans (when applicable) and benefits. This range may be modified in the future. This job posting may span more than one career level. Flock is aware of fraudulent individuals and agencies falsely claiming to represent our company. All legitimate communication from Flock will come from an email address ending in @ flocksafety.com . We do not make job offers through messaging apps, social platforms, or unauthorized third parties, and we will never request payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If you encounter suspicious outreach related to a Flock role, please report it to [email protected]