[Hiring] Staff Device SRE, Test Platform @Flock

Role Description

Flock is looking for a Staff Engineer in Device SRE to join the new Test Experience team. The team is responsible for delivering a scalable, reliable, observable, and self-service test experience for developers and testers. The team owns the construction and maintenance of the test platform and infrastructure as a managed service, applying core SRE disciplines to ensure consistency and reliability. Through standardization and shared services, the platform supports distributed ownership, with partner teams building and maintaining test suites and lab hardware for hardware-in-the-loop testing.

This role will work directly with several other teams:

• Device SRE Developer Experience: to integrate into existing build and release workflows and provide seamless contextual text execution and feedback to developers.
• Device SRE Release Experience: to integrate test results into release notes and release readiness reporting.
• Test Developers: to provide a test framework that abstracts hardware control (ex: ADB, firmware flashing), common services (ex: Qase), and status monitoring, so that test developers can focus on use cases and coverage instead of hardware quirks, lab outages, and service integrations.
• Lab Engineers: to provide a test framework that clarifies the abstractions provided and therefore sets the standard for control, responsiveness, observability, and uptime.
• Device Software Developers: to triage and repair test platform and infrastructure failures quickly and unblock development.

Additionally, this role will have a strong focus on designing and implementing advanced infrastructure practices for lab hardware such as self-healing and failover, so that we are not just reacting to outages but preventing them.

Please note: While we are a remote-first company and the typical work week can be conducted remotely, this position may require travel 1-3 times per year.

Qualifications

• Strong and transparent communicator, good leadership skills, and comfortable leading through influence across teams with technical excellence.
• Excited to solve new problems in a fast-paced environment while balancing short-term and long-term needs of the business.
• Experience developing and testing complex software systems (preferably embedded).
• Experience building and refactoring complex software platforms on which stakeholders build applications.
• Strong coding skills (ex: C/C++, Python, R, JS, Java, Groovy) and understanding of common algorithms.
• Proficiency in scripting languages (ex: Bash) to automate processes.
• Instrumentation, visualization, and alerting with metrics (ex: Prometheus, Grafana).
• Cloud computing (ex: AWS) & distributed systems.
• Site Reliability Engineering (on-call, monitoring, & alerting).
• Software development workflows (ex: continuous integration, test automation, branching, semantic versioning).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools (ex: Ansible, Terraform).
• Experience building hardware abstraction software, with an appreciation for the unique challenges in controlling physical hardware that is not production-ready.

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 Device SRE with Flock Safety.

The First 30 Days

• Get acquainted with the company, the team, the mission, and the product/customer experience.
• Observe the Flock Culture as it applies to your team and your day to day experience.
• Join and participate in team and org Slack channels.
• Participate in on-call rotations to serve as first responder for outages and general requests from stakeholders.
• Learn the existing test platform and infrastructure, and how it integrates into build and release workflows as well as production deployments.
• Review the code of other engineers in GitHub and Gerrit.
• Fix a bug in the test platform.
• Modify infrastructure in Terraform.

The First 60 Days

• Make an improvement in the test platform.
• Add a metric to the test platform into Prometheus, visualize it with Grafana, and create an on-call alert when it's out-of-spec and needs intervention.
• Discuss high-level career goals and expectations with your manager.
• Provide a short-term plan for remediating the top 3 most painful issues in the existing test platform and infrastructure.

90 Days & Beyond

• Visit the hardware lab in Atlanta to observe how it functions and meet the local engineers.
• Remediate the top 3 most painful issues in the existing test platform and infrastructure.
• Provide a holistic long-term plan for test platform and infrastructure that makes it a best-in-class system.

Salary & Equity

In this role, you’ll receive a starting salary of $200,000-$215,000 as well as Flock Stock Options.

Benefits

• 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. We will reimburse $10,000 a year for adoption, surrogacy, or fertility.
• 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.
• 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.