Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

Niche is hiring a Manager, Site Reliability Engineering to lead a small Site Reliability team while contributing hands-on to code, infrastructure, incident response, and platform tooling. The role owns technical direction, people leadership, reliability and performance outcomes, infrastructure modernization, and improvements to software delivery.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Maintain 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
• Own delivery outcomes and the team's quality bar: reliability and performance metrics, incident response effectiveness, and platform tool adoption
• Guide technical direction through system design, architectural consult, and hands-on code review, ensuring engineering excellence
• Own people leadership for your team: career development, performance management, hiring, and overall team health for 3–4 Site Reliability Engineers
• Own — 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
• Ensure the team balances urgency over perfection, while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability
• Model effective AI-assisted development in your own hands-on work and set the standard for your team's usage

Requirements:

• Strong, current hands-on software engineering experience — this role requires writing and reviewing code regularly, not occasionally
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 3+ years of professional platform engineering experience incorporating DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering principles
• Prior experience owning technical direction, or people management, and a clear readiness to take on both at once
• Comfort operating without a separate Tech Lead to lean on — you are the final technical word for your team
• Experience 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)
• Understanding of modern microservice-based architectures and methodologies
• Experience with or strong aptitude for AI-assisted development tooling and workflows
• A track record of making pragmatic technical trade-offs under real delivery pressure
• Experience with, or openness to evolving, agile/Scrum-based team processes
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, both verbal and written
• 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
• Experience with Golang, TypeScript, and React is a plus