Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability
Niche.com · Remote
About this role
## Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability — Niche ### About Niche Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free—powered by in-depth school/college profiles, 140M+ reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools. We also help thousands of schools recruit best-fit students by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply. ### About the Role The **Tech Lead Manager (TLM), Site Reliability** is the single technical and people leader for a small, high-ownership SRE team (**3–4 engineers**). You’ll build **reliable, scalable, and secure** environments that power the applications students and schools rely on. This is **not** a traditional Engineering Manager role. The TLM is expected to be **hands-on** with code, architecture, and technical decision-making—while also owning the full scope of people leadership (1:1s, growth, performance, and hiring). There is **no separate Tech Lead**; you own both technical direction and people leadership as one accountable owner. **Success looks like:** improved reliability/performance metrics, faster incident detection and recovery, higher adoption of platform tools/services, increased product team self-service, modernization across legacy services/infrastructure, and reduced recurring toil/interrupt work. ### What You Will Do - Take on inbound SRE/platform work directly (incident response, infrastructure automation, tooling)—not just review - Own technical debt and infrastructure modernization within your team’s scope - Maintain deep understanding of every project your engineers run (observability, disaster recovery, infrastructure) and push improvements - Own delivery outcomes and the team’s quality bar (reliability/performance, incident response effectiveness, platform adoption) - Guide technical direction via system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review - Own people leadership: career development, performance management, hiring, and overall team health - Shape how the team works (Agile/Scrum or Kanban) and help implement development process improvements - Balance urgency over perfection while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability - Model effective **AI-assisted development** in your own work and set the standard for your team ### First 12 Months (high level) - **First month:** meet the team, get hands-on in the codebase/infrastructure, build rapport, learn current stack/process/oncall/incident response - **Within 3 months:** become a direct contributor to inbound technical work; foster quality through reviews/pairing; establish 1:1/performance rhythm; improve on-call response and notifications - **Within 6 months:** lead meaningful technical/architectural decisions; catch/correct issues before they become delivery problems; complete a full performance/calibration cycle - **Within 12 months:** lead deliberate evolution of team process; be a trusted technical authority for SRE; navigate/triage work confidently; demonstrate sustained balance of hands-on technical contribution + people leadership ### What We Are Looking For - Strong, current **hands-on software engineering** experience (writing/reviewing code regularly) - **4+ years** professional software engineering - **3+ years** professional platform engineering with DevOps/SRE principles - Experience owning technical direction and/or people management—ready to do both at once - Comfort operating without a sep
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