Senior Manager, Site Reliability

Summary

Join Niche as a Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability and lead a team of 4-8 engineers in building reliable, scalable, and secure environments. You will drive the team's resourcing strategy, cultivate a culture of collaboration, and influence the software development lifecycle. Responsibilities include guiding the team's technical direction, acting as the primary point of contact for engineering, identifying and removing roadblocks, and advocating for data-driven decision-making. This pivotal role requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, 7+ years of software engineering experience, 5+ years of platform engineering experience, and 3+ years in an engineering leadership role. Expertise in distributed systems and modern microservice-based architectures is essential. The position offers a competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and a flexible work environment.

Requirements

• 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 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

Responsibilities

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Golang, Typescript, and React is a plus

Benefits

• 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
• 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) wit h employer match