Manager, Site Reliability Engineering
Niche.com · Remote
About this role
## Manager, Site Reliability Engineering — Niche ### About Niche Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140M reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them—while also helping thousands of schools recruit best-fit students. ### About the Role The **Manager, Site Reliability (Tech Lead Manager)** is the single technical and people leader for a small, high-ownership SRE team (3–4 engineers). This is a pivotal role focused on building **reliable, scalable, and secure** environments that power the applications students and schools rely on. This is **not** a traditional EM role where technical fluency is only a nice-to-have. You are expected to be **hands-on** with code, architecture, and technical decision-making—while also owning full people leadership (1:1s, growth, performance, and hiring). There is **no separate Tech Lead** on this team—your role combines both technical direction and people management as one accountable owner. ### What You Will Do - Take on inbound SRE and platform work directly (incident response, infrastructure automation, tooling)—not just review it - 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 for improvements - Own delivery outcomes and the team’s quality bar (reliability/performance metrics, incident response effectiveness, platform tool adoption) - Guide technical direction via system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review - Own people leadership for 3–4 Site Reliability Engineers (career development, performance management, hiring, team health) - Help shape how the team works (Agile/Scrum or Kanban) and contribute to the development process - 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 the team ### First Month - Meet with team members to learn Niche and the team through onboarding - Get hands-on in the codebase and infrastructure your team owns (ship something) - Build rapport with direct reports and develop real technical opinions on ongoing projects - Learn the current tech stack, products, and team process (ceremonies, planning, review, oncall, incident response) ### Within 3 Months - Become a regular contributor to inbound technical work (incident response, platform tooling, technical debt, infrastructure) - Foster quality through thoughtful code reviews, pairing, and promoting platform tools/practices - Make your first joint call with engineering leadership on a process/technical improvement - Establish a working rhythm for 1:1s, performance conversations, and career development - Join the on-call rotation and suggest improvements to response time and repeated notifications ### Within 6 Months - Own a nontrivial technical decision or architectural direction (e.g., observability, disaster recovery, infrastructure) - Demonstrate proactive detection and correction of issues before they become delivery problems (including DR/incident exercises) - Complete a full performance/calibration cycle for your directs ### Within 12 Months - Lead (with engineering leadership) a deliberate evolution of the
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