Tech Lead Manager, Site Reliability
US$146,000 – US$183,000 / yr base salary
Posted 14 Sep 2026
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 4+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Remote
- Contract
- Full-time
- Visa sponsorship
- Not offered
| Base salary | US$146,000 – US$183,000 / yr |
|---|
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