[Hiring] Manager, Site Reliability Engineering @Niche

Role Description

The Manager, 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 Manager, Site Reliability (Tech Lead Manager) 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.

• Take on inbound SRE and platform work directly rather than delegating it by default.
• Own technical debt and infrastructure modernization within your team's scope.
• Maintain deep understanding of every project your engineers are running.
• Own delivery outcomes and the team's quality bar.
• Guide technical direction through system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review.
• Own people leadership for your team: career development, performance management, hiring, and overall team health.
• Own how the team works, 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.

Qualifications

• Strong, current hands-on software engineering experience.
• 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.
• Comfort operating without a separate Tech Lead to lean on.
• Experience with distributed systems and technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), HashiCorp Vault, Grafana, GitHub Actions, Postgres, Kafka/MSK, Redis/Valkey, or equivalent platforms.
• 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.

Requirements

• Demonstrate ownership of a nontrivial technical decision or architectural direction for your team's systems.
• Show a track record of catching and correcting technical or platform issues before they became delivery problems.
• Complete a full performance/calibration cycle for your directs.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation in a fast-growing company.
• Best-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage.
• Flexible Paid Time Off Policy.
• Stipend for building your work from home office.
• Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid).
• Meaningful 401(k) with employer match.
• Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users.
• You will join a team that cares about you, our mission, our work - and celebrates our wins together!