Technical Lead - NOC

Network Operations Center (NOC) Technical Leader Roles & Responsibilities

A NOC Technical Leader is responsible for overseeing network operations, ensuring service availability, managing incident response, leading the NOC team, and driving operational excellence.

1. Network Monitoring & Operations

• Oversee 24x7 monitoring of network infrastructure, servers, applications, and services.
• Ensure proactive identification and resolution of network issues.
• Monitor network performance, availability, capacity, and security events.
• Review and validate critical alerts and escalations.

2. Incident Management

• Lead the response to major incidents and service outages.
• Coordinate troubleshooting activities across technical teams and vendors.
• Ensure timely restoration of services within agreed SLAs.
• Conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and implement preventive actions.
• Chair incident review and post-mortem meetings.

3. Team Leadership & People Management

• Manage and mentor NOC engineers and analysts.
• Conduct performance reviews and provide coaching.
• Develop training plans to enhance technical competencies.
• Manage shift coverage, roster planning, and resource allocation.
• Foster a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

4. Escalation Management

• Act as the highest operational escalation point for critical issues.
• Coordinate with internal stakeholders, customers, and third-party vendors.
• Ensure proper communication during service disruptions.
• Escalate risks and critical issues to senior management when required.

5. Service Delivery & SLA Compliance

• Ensure adherence to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Operational Level Agreements (OLAs), and KPIs.
• Monitor service performance metrics and operational dashboards.
• Drive improvements in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
• Prepare service health and operational performance reports.

6. Change & Problem Management

• Review and approve network changes from an operational perspective.
• Assess risks associated with planned activities.
• Participate in CAB (Change Advisory Board) meetings.
• Identify recurring issues and drive permanent fixes through problem management.

7. Stakeholder & Customer Management

• Serve as a key point of contact for customers during critical incidents.
• Provide operational updates and status reports.
• Build strong relationships with business units and support teams.
• Participate in governance and operational review meetings.

8. Reporting & Documentation

• Prepare daily, weekly, and monthly operational reports.
• Maintain SOPs, troubleshooting guides, and runbooks.
• Track incident trends and recommend improvement initiatives.
• Ensure accurate documentation of network architecture and operational processes.

9. Continuous Improvement

• Identify automation opportunities to reduce manual effort.
• Drive process optimization initiatives.
• Implement monitoring enhancements and operational best practices.
• Support service transition and onboarding of new technologies.

Technical Responsibilities

• Maintain expertise in:

o Routing & Switching (Cisco, Juniper, Arista)

o WAN, SD-WAN, MPLS

o Firewalls and Network Security

o Wireless Networks

o DNS, DHCP, IPAM

o Data Center and Cloud Networking (Azure, AWS, GCP)

o Monitoring Tools (SolarWinds, PRTG, Zabbix, Nagios, LogicMonitor, Splunk)

• Support architecture reviews and technical decision-making.