Head of Engineering
Flock Homes · San Francisco · $250,000–$300,000 (stated in the posting)
About Flock
Flock Homes helps the 17 million Americans who own rental properties unlock the equity and time trapped in their real estate. Today that starts with the hardest and most consequential decision, the exit, where we provide the most cost-efficient and seamless path available.
Our flagship product is a technology-enabled Direct 721 Exchange platform, currently focused on single-family and multifamily rentals. We also offer a Private Client model for asset classes that don't fit the flagship Fund, such as medical and dental offices, retail and self storage. We’re growing fast and are looking for smart, curious, dedicated people who want to help build something category-defining.
We’re backed by top tier investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Primary Ventures, Renegade Partners, SUSA Ventures, 1Sharpe Ventures, and leaders from Invitation Homes and Opendoor.
Where we are today
- Nearly 2,000 units in the Fund across 17 States
- ~$360M in real estate value
- Over 320 exchanges completed, deferring more than $100 million in taxable gains for clients.
About the role
Build Flock Homes 2.0 while scaling Flock Homes 1.0. That is the job in one line.
You will run engineering at Flock - the people, the roadmap, the architecture, the sprints, and a meaningful share of the code. We are a lean team, without a product manager, so you will also be the person responsible for translating business vision to product vision, and the person who says no when the answer should be no.
We want someone with strong opinions about what is worth building and the conviction to argue for them, who owns technical direction rather than waiting for it to be handed to them, and who holds a high standard for what is allowed to ship as version one. This is a player-coach seat today with a path to CTO for the person who earns it.
What you will own in the first 12 to 18 months
- Throughput. Continue to scale our core exchange fund’s existing infrastructure so that our funnel can handle five to ten times today's volume without five to ten times the people.
- New solutions. Leverage, replicate and refine our existing infrastructure to support the launch of new exchange funds and new vehicles, e.g. for specific regions or new asset classes.
- Flock 2.0 and distribution. Build custom products and integrations for distribution via financial advisors and custodial platforms.
- Go-to-market experiments. Run fast ship, measure, and close-out cycles with the business. Most of these will fail. We need them to fail fast and cheaply.
What you will do
- Set and own technical direction, architecture, and engineering standards
- Run sprints, allocate work, and keep the team shipping against clear priorities
- Manage requirements: translate stakeholder asks into requirements, sequence the roadmap, and push back when an idea is not worth building
- Write and review code, and hold the bar on what ships
- Hire, develop, and retain engineers as the team grows.
- Scope new products and help refine business vision into product vision.
- Work directly with the CEO, COO, acquisitions, investor relations, and operations.
Who you are
- You have led engineers at a growth-stage fintech or financial infrastructure company, and you are ready to step up. You want real ownership of the technical direction of a company.
- Still close to the code. You have written meaningful production code in the last year, and you want to keep doing so
- You have shipped software where correctness mattered: payments, lending, brokerage, infrastructure, anything where a wrong line of code costs real money or real trust
- You frame the problem before you solve it, and you make the people around you do the same
- You have opinions about what should be built and the conviction to argue for them, including with the CEO and COO
- You are calm under pressure and able to parse noise from signal
- You are comfortable context switching rapidly: being the product manager, the architect, and a senior engineer in the same week
- You want to be in an office, in person, with the team, five days a week. If you are not energized by that, this is not the role for you.
Who this is probably not
We say this to save everyone time, not to be difficult.
- Someone whose last meaningful code was three or four years ago
- Someone whose instinct is to seek consensus over progress
- Someone coming from a large, highly institutionalized engineering org who has not operated with a small team and no safety net
- Someone chasing whatever company or industry is hot, who is not motivated by Flock's mission, structure, and ownership
How we work
A few things that are true about Flock Homes and will be true about you if you join our team.
- Excellence is the bar, everywhere. Acceptable work produces an artifact. Excellent work produces an experience: someone on the other end who trusts us more than they did before. We expect the second one, and we expect you to hold the team to it.
- Know which doors are one-way. Some decisions can be walked back. Some cannot. We move fast on the reversible ones and think hard on the rest. We expect you to know the difference and to set the tempo accordingly.
- Ship fast, but the core cannot break. We are an SEC-regulated investment product. We need to move fast but with intention.
- Direct and honest. We say what we think, we disagree in the open, and we commit once a decision is made. We would rather hear an uncomfortable truth early than a comfortable one late.
- Taste still matters. We use AI heavily and expect you to. But AI also makes it easy to produce something adequate quickly. The job is knowing the difference between adequate and good, and refusing to ship the former.
- Small team, no hiding. Everyone at Flock does real work. There is no layer of management to disappear into. For the right person, this is a feature not a bug.
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: $250,000 to $300,000, depending on experience.
- Variable pay: Meaningful annual bonus tied to individual performance and business metrics.
- Equity: A generous new-hire stock option grant on a standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff.
- Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), and paid time off.
Pay transparency. In compliance with California and Colorado state law, the base salary range for this position is $250,000 to $300,000 per year. Actual base pay within the range depends on factors including relevant experience, skills, and the scope of the role at the time of hire. Base salary is one part of total compensation, which also includes variable pay and equity as described above.