Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability

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, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply. Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally. About The Role The Tech Lead Manager (TLM), Site Reliability is the single technical and people leader for a small, high-ownership Site Reliability team (3–4 engineers) focused on building reliable, scalable, and secure environments that power the applications our students and schools rely on. This is a pivotal role in executing our strategy to accelerate product development and reduce barriers to software delivery without sacrificing quality and reliability. This is not a traditional Engineering Manager role with technical fluency as a nice-to-have — the TLM is expected to be hands-on with code, architecture, and technical decision-making on a regular, ongoing basis, in addition to owning the full scope of people leadership: 1:1s, growth, performance, and hiring. Where a typical EM posting emphasizes strategy, stakeholder management, and guiding technical direction through others, the TLM personally takes on inbound coding work, personally owns technical debt, and personally carries enough depth in every project their engineers are running to challenge and improve the technical approach — not just track progress against it. There is no separate Tech Lead on this team. The TLM holds both halves of the job — technical decision making and people management — as one accountable owner. Success for the team is measured by reliability and performance metrics for the overall product and delivery systems, reduced incident detection and recovery times, adoption rates of platform tools and services, increased product development team self-service, modernization efforts across a portfolio of legacy services and infrastructure, and reduction of recurring toilsome or interrupt activities. What You Will Do Take on inbound SRE and platform work directly rather than delegating it by default — you are a working contributor to incident response, infrastructure automation, and tooling, not just their reviewer Own technical debt and infrastructure modernization within your team’s scope, prioritizing and resolving it directly rather than routing it to someone else Maintain deep enough understanding of every project your engineers are running — observability, disaster recovery, infrastructure work — to push on it, not just check in on it Own delivery outcomes and the team’s quality bar: reliability and performance metrics, incident response effectiveness, and platform tool adoption Guide technical direction through system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review, ensuring engineering excellence Own people leadership for your team: career development, performance management, hiring, and overall team health for 3–4 Site Reliability Engineers Own — jointly with engineering leadership — how the team works. Today that’s Agile Scrum or Kanban; you’re expected to give feedback and help shape and implement our development process Ensure the team balances urgency over perfection, while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability Model effective AI-assisted development in your own hands-on work and set the standard for your team’s usage During the First Month: Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings Get hands-on in the codebase and infrastructure your team owns — not just reading it, but shipping something Build rapport with your direct reports and understand each ongoing project (observability, disaster recovery, infrastructure work) deeply enough to have a real technical opinion on it Work alongside the team to learn the tech stack, the products you support, and the team’s current process (ceremonies, planning, review, oncall, incident response) as it exists today. Within 3 Months: Be a regular, direct contributor to inbound technical work — incident response, platform tooling, technical debt, infrastructure — alongside your team, not just reviewing their output Foster a culture of quality by providing thoughtful, constructive feedback through code reviews and pairing, and promoting adoption of platform tools and practices Make your first joint call with engineering leadership on a process adjustment and technical improvement, however small Have established a working rhythm for 1:1s, performance conversations, and career development with each direct report Join the on-call rotation suggesting improvements to improve response time and repeated notifications Within 6 Months: Demonstrate ownership of a nontrivial technical decision or architectural direction for your team’s systems (e.g., observability platform adoption, disaster recovery improvements, infrastructure) Show a track record of catching and correcting technical or platform issues before they became delivery problems, including participating in disaster recovery and incident response exercises Complete a full performance/calibration cycle for your directs Within 12 Months: Have led — jointly with engineering leadership — a deliberate evolution of your team’s process, grounded in what’s actually worked for your team rather than an inherited default Be a recognized technical authority for Site Reliability, trusted with architectural calls without needing to route them elsewhere Have full confidence navigating the Niche codebase and triaging technical work, getting directly involved as needed Have a demonstrated record of balancing hands-on technical contribution with sustained people leadership — neither crowding out the other What We Are Looking For Strong, current hands-on software engineering experience — this role requires writing and reviewing code regularly, not occasionally 4+ years of professional software engineering experience 3+ years of professional platform engineering experience incorporating DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering principles Prior experience owning technical direction, or people management, and a clear readiness to take on both at once Comfort operating without a separate Tech Lead to lean on — you are the final technical word for your team Experience with distributed systems and technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), kops, HashiCorp Vault, Grafana, GitHub Actions, Postgres, Kafka/MSK, Redis/Valkey, or equivalent platforms (Azure/GCP also welcome) Understanding of modern microservice-based architectures and methodologies Experience with Golang, TypeScript, and React is a plus Experience with or strong aptitude for AI-assisted development tooling and workflows A track record of making pragmatic technical trade-offs under real delivery pressure Experience with, or openness to evolving, agile/Scrum-based team processes Excellent collaboration and communication skills, both verbal and written Compensation Our national target base salary range is $146,000-$183,000, plus participation in our Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program. Base compensation will be commensurate with experience and skills. At Niche, our Total Rewards Philosophy is centered around creating a workplace environment that attracts, motivates, and retains top talent by providing a comprehensive and competitive rewards package. This philosophy is built on the principles of performance-based compensation, best-in-class benefits and work-life balance, and employee well-being. Interview Process Candidate experience is a top priority for our talent and hiring teams. We believe in providing a transparent, authentic and comprehensive interview process where you have the opportunity to learn about us while we get to know you and your experience. The interview process is outlined here: Phone Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner