Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Niche is a school search company that helps students and families research and enroll in schools while helping schools attract best-fit students. The Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability leads a small Site Reliability team while remaining hands-on with coding, architecture, infrastructure, incident response, technical debt, and platform modernization. The role also owns people leadership, delivery outcomes, team processes, and reliability standards.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Skills
- 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 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
- Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening
- Experience with Golang, TypeScript, and React is a plus
Benefits
- Participation in the Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program
- A fully flexible workforce empowering employees to choose to work remotely, in the Pittsburgh office, or whatever combination suits them
- Best-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage
- Flexible Paid Time Off Policy
- Stipend to build a work-from-home office
- Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid), in addition to short-term disability for birthing parents
- 401(k) with employer match
- Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on the company and millions of users
- A team that cares about employees, the mission, and the work, and celebrates wins together
Company Overview