{"id":2387360,"url":"https://alion.io/job/niche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability","title":"Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability","company":{"id":15444,"name":"Niche","domain":"niche.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/niche","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":146000,"max":183000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":183000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":true},{"name":"Go","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"HashiCorp Vault","optional":true},{"name":"Kanban","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true},{"name":"Scrum","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T13:30:27Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T21:30:19Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":29,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":29},"description":"About Niche\nNiche 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.\nNiche 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.\nAbout The Role\nThe 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.\nThis 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.\nThere 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.\nSuccess 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.\nWhat You Will Do\nTake 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\nOwn technical debt and infrastructure modernization within your team's scope, prioritizing and resolving it directly rather than routing it to someone else\nMaintain 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\nOwn delivery outcomes and the team's quality bar: reliability and performance metrics, incident response effectiveness, and platform tool adoption\nGuide technical direction through system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review, ensuring engineering excellence\nOwn people leadership for your team: career development, performance management, hiring, and overall team health for 3-4 Site Reliability Engineers\nOwn - 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\nEnsure the team balances urgency over perfection, while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability\nModel effective AI-assisted development in your own hands-on work and set the standard for your team's usage\nDuring the First Month:\nLearn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings\nGet hands-on in the codebase and infrastructure your team owns - not just reading it, but shipping something\nBuild 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\nWork 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. \nWithin 3 Months:\nBe a regular, direct contributor to inbound technical work - incident response, platform tooling, technical debt, infrastructure - alongside your team, not just reviewing their output\nFoster a culture of quality by providing thoughtful, constructive feedback through code reviews and pairing, and promoting adoption of platform tools and practices\nMake your first joint call with engineering leadership on a process adjustment and technical improvement, however small\nHave established a working rhythm for 1:1s, performance conversations, and career development with each direct report\nJoin the on-call rotation suggesting improvements to improve response time and repeated notifications\nWithin 6 Months:\nDemonstrate ownership of a nontrivial technical decision or architectural direction for your team's systems (e.g., observability platform adoption, disaster recovery improvements, infrastructure)\nShow 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\nComplete a full performance/calibration cycle for your directs\nWithin 12 Months:\nHave 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\nBe a recognized technical authority for Site Reliability, trusted with architectural calls without needing to route them elsewhere\nHave full confidence navigating the Niche codebase and triaging technical work, getting directly involved as needed\nHave a demonstrated record of balancing hands-on technical contribution with sustained people leadership - neither crowding out the other\nWhat We Are Looking For\nStrong, current hands-on software engineering experience - this role requires writing and reviewing code regularly, not occasionally\n4+ years of professional software engineering experience\n3+ years of professional platform engineering experience incorporating DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering principles\nPrior experience owning technical direction, or people management, and a clear readiness to take on both at once\nComfort operating without a separate Tech Lead to lean on - you are the final technical word for your team\nExperience 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)\nUnderstanding of modern microservice-based architectures and methodologies\nExperience with Golang, TypeScript, and React is a plus\nExperience with or strong aptitude for AI-assisted development tooling and workflows\nA track record of making pragmatic technical trade-offs under real delivery pressure\nExperience with, or openness to evolving, agile/Scrum-based team processes\nExcellent collaboration and communication skills, both verbal and written\nCompensation \nOur 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.\nAt 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.\nInterview Process\nCandidate 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:\nPhone Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner - 30 Minutes\n\nVideo Interview with Hiring Manager - 45 Minutes\n\nTechnical Assessment - 45 Minutes\nTeam Interview - 45 Minutes\n\nLeadership Interview - 45 Minutes\n\nWhy Niche?\nWe are a fully flexible workforce empowering our employees to choose to work remotely, in our Pittsburgh office or whatever combination suits you\nFull time, salaried position with competitive compensation in a fast-growing company\nBest-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage\nFlexible Paid Time Off Policy\nStipend that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences\nParental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid) in addition to short term disability for birthing parents\nMeaningful 401(k) with employer match\nYour ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users\nYou will join a team that cares about you, our mission, our work - and celebrates our wins together!\nNiche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening. \nWe are currently hiring in states where we currently have employees: AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MO, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, DC, WV.\nCandidates only. No recruiters or agencies, please. Sorry, we do not offer relocation assistance.\nNiche is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, marital status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, nationality, sex, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.\nAll interviews are being held remotely. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.","description_format":"text","description_chars":10272,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule","Home office","Parental leave","Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["EdTech Platforms","Online Reviews & Ratings"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-12T20:26:15Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":60,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.799,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":28,"expected_fill_days":35,"reasons":["conf:2","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":183000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/niche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/niche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T00:09:52Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":293,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":15444},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=15444"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fniche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fniche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fniche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/niche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fniche-tech-lead-manager-site-reliability"}]}