What’s it like to engineer the future of freight? One word: “Energizing”

Take a look inside Flock Freight’s highly collaborative engineering team

At Flock Freight®, we know one thing to be true: Reimagining a $60-billion industry takes a village. That’s why collaboration and innovation go hand in hand in our engineering and product departments. Every team’s work is highly interconnected — from smoothing internal workflows to enhancing in-app experiences for shippers and carriers — and this theme threads itself throughout our core values: Go all in, think big, empower others, be agile, and do the right thing. Teamwork powers our mission of changing freight shipping for the better — and cutting-edge tech makes that mission a reality. We sat down with Sahil Takiar, one of our staff software engineers on the Engineering Infrastructure Team, to talk about his experience working on the technology that’s driving sustainable change across the logistics industry. Want to know more about how Flock Freight innovates with purpose? Follow along.

Tell us a little about your role at Flock Freight.

Sahil: I'm a Staff Software Engineer on the Engineering Infrastructure Team. My role is to build out the infrastructure that our core application — the Flock Platform — runs on, and to empower our product engineers to be as efficient as possible! My current focus is on the scalability and performance of our platform, and to ensure our product can scale to meet our growing customer demand.

What were you doing before, and why did you decide to join the Flock?

Sahil: I spent the past several years of my career working in the data analytics/big data space (e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Hive, etc.). Most recently, I was a database engineer at Cloudera working on the internals of Apache Impala, an analytics database optimized for low-latency queries.I decided to join Flock Freight for a few reasons.One reason I joined is Flock Freight’s environmental mission. I found it amazing that Flock Freight is a Certified B Corporation; it showed me that they’re truly dedicated to making a difference in the freight industry’s carbon footprint through technology, and to using business as a force for good.The other reason I decided to join is the technical level of the engineering team. Even during the interview process, I could tell that everyone I spoke with was incredibly technically strong, hard-working, and dedicated to the team. Within days of starting at Flock Freight, my suspicions had been confirmed. I've enjoyed working with every engineer on the team, and have been incredibly impressed with the overall strength and ability of the engineering organization.

What gets you excited about the work you’re doing?

Sahil: Flock Freight's infrastructure is built using modern, cutting-edge pieces of technology — such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo, Snowflake, GCP, etc. — and working here allows me to use all these tools on a daily basis. We’re constantly looking for innovative tools that will help augment our platform, which gives me the opportunity to learn about new pieces of technology that could improve our capabilities.

What’s it like to work on Flock Freight’s engineering team?

Sahil: Most of my prior experience has been at larger tech companies, and working at Flock Freight has really given me the smaller-company experience. It’s been great to work at a company where, within days, I already knew every engineer on the team and, within weeks, I had already worked with the vast majority of them.The team itself is highly collaborative and works really efficiently together, which I find rare compared to other companies. Being able to work in this environment has been incredibly exciting and energizing.

One of our core values at Flock Freight is “Think Big.” What have you learned at Flock Freight that improved you personally, or professionally?

Sahil: I've learned a lot since I joined Flock Freight and continue to learn more every day. Prior to joining the company, I knew close to nothing about the trucking industry, so it’s been fascinating to learn about how the industry works and how we’re disrupting it. Environmental responsibility is really important to me, so it's been awesome to work for a Certified B Corporation and see all the different ways Flock Freight is tackling the freight industry’s greenhouse gas emissions through efficient tech solutions.Professionally, I've gotten a ton of experience with building out modern, scalable web services. I learned a lot about how to build a web application from the ground up, and how to blitzscale a product. Flock Freight is going through a unique high-growth period — so it’s a great time to join!