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