Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Multimodal Modeling

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, helped solve approximately 20% of reported crimes in areas where it is deployed, and 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.

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Multimodal Modeling you will lead the advancement of our core embedding-based retrieval systems, with a primary focus on the scientific aspects of modeling. This includes fine-tuning and extending multimodal models (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP) to improve performance, generalization, and cross-modal alignment. You’ll work on unifying text and image representations, improving model performance, and ensuring extensibility across evolving product use cases. Your work will be central to Flock’s ability to deliver fast, accurate, and scalable search experiences powered by state-of-the-art vision-language systems.

• 7+ years of industry experience in Machine Learning with a focus on representation learning, multimodal modeling, or embedding-based retrieval.

• Deep domain knowledge in at least one area: computer vision, natural language processing, or recommendation systems.

• Strong proficiency in PyTorch, with experience fine-tuning foundation models and adapting pretrained vision-language models to real-world tasks.

• Demonstrated ability to customize and extend model architectures, training loops, loss functions, and data pipelines to deliver impact.

• Experience with embedding-based retrieval, including contrastive learning, multimodal alignment, and designing evaluation methods for vector similarity search and embedding quality.

• Solid engineering fundamentals in Python, with familiarity in Git, SQL, and Bash.

• Comfortable working independently and navigating ambiguity, with a track record of solving open-ended modeling problems.

• Familiarity with model compression techniques, such as distillation, quantization, and architecture pruning, to improve inference efficiency and deployability.

• Experience with vector search infrastructure, including provisioning, maintaining, and querying large-scale vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Weaviate, Pinecone)

• Proficient with multi-GPU and distributed training workflows, to scale training of large multimodal models efficiently

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.

We prescribe to 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 Machine Learning Scientist at Flock Safety. 

The First 30 Days

• Meet the team & cross-functional stakeholders 

• Understand the system architecture for freeform search and the ownership of the various components

• One major cultural component within Flock’s engineering teams is the “first day push”. The first day push focuses setup and onboarding to the things that matter to deliver value.

The First 60 Days 

• Gain familiarity and performing R&D

• Begin to automate the systems for training, evaluation, testing, and model release

90 Days & Beyond 

• Own long-term maintenance

• Become a leader for the team offering hand-ons help

• Begin exploratory work

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]