Senior 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

We are looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability who is motivated by building a high performance SRE team focused on developing reliable, scalable, and secure environments that power the applications our students and schools rely on. This is a pivotal role to the organization executing on a strategy to accelerate product development and reduce barriers to software delivery without sacrificing quality and reliability. We are looking for a leader who has proven that they have transformed engineering organizations to own, end to end, the software they are delivering through technical and cultural initiatives. 

You will be joining the Platform Engineering pod of our Product Development Organization. As a Site Reliability team leader, you’ll be focused on the demonstrable impact of SRE initiatives. Success for the team would be measured by reliability and performance metrics for the overall product and delivery systems, reduced incident detection and recovery times, increased developer experience satisfaction scores, adoption rates of platform tools and services, increased product development team self-service, modernization efforts across a portfolio of legacy services, and reduction of recurring toilsome or interrupt activities.  

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you are the leader of the team's culture, direction and execution. You will be responsible for the professional development, career growth, and performance management of Site Reliability Engineers. You will partner closely with engineering leadership and stakeholders across the organization to influence reliability practices throughout engineering, clarify platform requirements, manage and represent the technical roadmap, advocate for priorities, and orchestrate the team’s development process to be optimized for fast delivery and rapid learning. 

What You Will Do

• Lead a team of 4-8 engineers of various experience levels, guiding their careers and helping them have a meaningful impact on the team’s success
• Drive the team’s resourcing strategy and allocation, employing cross-training and promoting t-shaped skills to boost the team’s versatility and flexibility
• Lead by example to cultivate a culture of collaboration, engagement, high performance, and continuous improvement
• Operate with a platform as a product mindset to define problems, identify solutions, and break down projects into iterative phases
• Influence the software development lifecycle, collaborating with product development teams and leaders on the delivery, efficiency, security and reliability of the applications they’re developing and running in production
• Ensure the team is equipped with the necessary processes and strategic context to build quality solutions that can quickly deliver value to our product teams, users, and clients
• Guide technical direction of your team’s initiatives through system design, architectural consult, and code review as necessary, ensuring engineering excellence 
• Act as the primary point of contact for engineering on your team, representing the team’s work and priorities to stakeholders, leadership, and other product teams
• Identify and remove roadblocks that could impede the team’s ability to move quickly and deliver features in a timely manner 
• Advocate for and implement a culture of data-driven decision making, leveraging metrics and analytics to inform choices, both for product roadmaps and team processes
• Ensure the team balances urgency over perfection, while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability

During the First Month:

• Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings
• Meet and build a rapport with your direct reports, cross-functional team members, and other engineering managers
• Shadow engineering team members to learn more about our tech stack, the products we support, and areas where our development process could be streamlined

Within 3 Mon