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 Months:

• Utilize your solid understanding of the Niche tech stack, our business needs,  and identified opportunities to produce and drive a roadmap that maximizes SRE impact, evidenced by data
• Foster a culture of quality by providing thoughtful, constructive feedback through code reviews, pair programming, and promoting adoption of platform tools and practices
• Meet regularly with direct reports to discuss performance and career progression, and provide continuous feedback

Within 6 Months:

• Accomplish key data driven milestones in the improvement of site reliability and software delivery metrics, observability platform adoption and effectiveness, and burn down of critical infrastructure needs
• Participate and lead in disaster recovery and incident response exercises to ensure the team is always prepared and improving effectiveness of those critical procedures
• Conduct talent assessments for your direct reports and participate in departmental calibration conversations

Within 12 Months:

• Take lead on the overall SRE strategy with an emphasis on defining what success looks like and how to get there
• Full confidence navigating the Niche codebase and triaging technical work to the appropriate teams, getting directly involved as needed
• Work with other managers in shaping the culture and process of the broader engineering organization, fostering Site Reliability as a shared responsibility

What We Are Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 5+ years of professional platform engineering experience incorporating DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering principles
• 3+ years in an engineering leadership role
• Expertise in distributed systems utilizing technologies such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Grafana, Github Actions, Postgres or equivalent platforms
• Deep understanding of modern microservice-based architectures and methodologies
• Experience with Golang, Typescript, and React is a plus
• Experience managing engineers in an agile/scrum framework on cross-functional, collaborative teams
• Demonstrated ability to drive higher performance: analyzing team performance, identifying opportunities to improve, implementing changes and measure results
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, both verbal and written
• Strong hands-on experience developing modern multi-tiered user-facing applications 
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Compensation 

Our national target base salary range is $154,000-$193,000, plus participation in our Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program. Base compensation will be commensurate with experience and skills.

At 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.

Interview Process

Candidate 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:

• Phone Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner - 30 Minutes

• Video Interview with Hiring Manager - 45 Minutes

• Team Interviews - 4 Individual Interviews (45 Minutes Each)

• Leadership Interview - 30 Minutes

Why Niche?

• We are a fully flexible workforce empowering our employees to choose to work remotely, in our Pittsburgh office or whatever combination suits you
• Full time, salaried position with 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 that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences
• Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid) in addition to short term disability for birthing parents
• 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!

Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening.  

We 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.

Candidates only.  No recruiters or agencies, please. Sorry, we do not offer relocation assistance.

Niche 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, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.

All 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.