NOC Team Lead

About the Role
The NOC Team Leader is responsible for leading and controlling day-to-day 24x7 Network Operations Center activities to ensure continuous monitoring, timely incident response, service restoration, SLA achievement, and effective operational communication for managed-services customers. This role entails providing technical and operational leadership to NOC engineers, acting as the primary shift/operational escalation point, coordinating major incidents with resolver groups and customer stakeholders, and ensuring that events, incidents, service requests, and changes are handled according to agreed ITIL processes, SOPs, and contractual requirements. The Team Leader drives ticket quality, shift discipline, knowledge management, operational reporting, team capability, and continuous service improvement.

Responsibilities

• Lead and supervise the NOC team during assigned operations and ensure effective 24x7 service coverage, shift readiness, workload allocation, and proper handover between shifts.
• Ensure continuous monitoring of customer infrastructure, networks, systems, cloud services, applications, and other in-scope configuration items using approved monitoring and observability platforms.
• Act as the first operational and technical escalation point for NOC engineers and provide guidance for event validation, troubleshooting, impact assessment, ticket classification, and escalation.
• Lead the NOC response for P1/P2 and other major incidents, ensuring immediate engagement of the correct resolver teams, timely management escalation, stakeholder communication, and service restoration within agreed SLA.
• Ensure all actionable alerts and customer-reported issues are logged accurately in the ITSM platform, correctly categorized and prioritized, assigned to the appropriate support group, updated throughout the lifecycle, and properly closed.
• Monitor SLA performance in real-time and proactively intervene on tickets approaching response, update, or resolution thresholds; escalate risks before SLA breaches wherever possible.
• Maintain ownership of incidents from detection through restoration from the NOC coordination perspective, including technical follow-up, vendor/resolver engagement, and confirmation that monitoring has returned to normal.
• Ensure strict adherence to Incident, Event, Major Incident, Change, Problem, and Service Request procedures, escalation matrices, communication protocols, SOPs, and customer-specific operational requirements.
• Coordinate approved changes and planned maintenance activities from the NOC perspective, validate monitoring impact, track execution status, and ensure required start, progress, completion, rollback, or extension communications are issued.
• Review ticket quality, event-to-ticket compliance, troubleshooting evidence, timelines, work notes, assignment accuracy, and closure information; coach engineers on identified quality gaps.
• Prepare and validate shift, daily, weekly, and monthly operational inputs covering major incidents, SLA/KPI performance, alert volumes, recurring events, escalations, service risks, and improvement actions.
• Maintain accurate shift handover records, operational logs, known-issue registers, escalation contacts, SOPs, runbooks, and knowledge articles, ensuring information remains current and usable by all shifts.
• Identify recurring alarms, incident patterns, monitoring gaps, false positives, and operational inefficiencies, and work with technical teams and management to drive problem management, tuning, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Support onboarding, knowledge transfer, shadowing/reverse-shadowing, and service transition activities for new customers, technologies, and monitoring scope, ensuring operational readiness prior to handover to steady-state support.
• Coach and develop NOC engineers through technical guidance, performance feedback, knowledge sharing, training, and individual capability development; identify skill gaps and recommend development actions.
• Support roster and resource planning, attendance and shift discipline, leave coordination, and operational coverage to ensure service continuity without compromising contractual obligations.
• Maintain professional communication with customers, internal technical teams, vendors, Service Delivery/Operations Management, and other stakeholders, particularly during high-impact incidents and escalations.
• Ensure compliance with policies, customer security requirements, access-control practices, information-security requirements, quality procedures, and applicable ISO/ITSM governance controls.
• Promote automation and operational efficiency by identifying repetitive NOC activities suitable for event correlation, auto-ticketing, notification automation, dashboarding, or other approved AIOps/automation use cases.
• Perform other operational leadership duties reasonably required to support the Managed Monitoring Services function and customer service commitments.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of experience in NOC, infrastructure operations, or managed services, including at least 2 years in a senior/shift-lead/team-lead capacity.
• Strong operational experience in 24x7 enterprise or government environments supporting multi-technology infrastructure and business-critical services.
• Strong knowledge of NOC monitoring/observability, event management, ITSM ticket lifecycle, escalation, and major incident coordination.
• Sound technical understanding of LAN/WAN, network devices, firewalls/load balancers, Windows/Linux servers, virtualization, storage, backup, cloud, and enterprise applications.
• Practical knowledge of ITIL Incident, Event, Problem, Change, Request, and Major Incident Management practices.
• Demonstrated experience in SLA/KPI control, shift management, ticket-quality assurance, operational reporting, and customer communication.
• Ability to lead high-severity incidents under pressure, coordinate multiple technical teams, and communicate concise business-impact updates to management and customers.
• Experience developing and maintaining SOPs, runbooks, knowledge articles, escalation matrices, and shift handover documentation.
• Strong analytical capability to identify recurring incidents, monitoring gaps, operational risks, and opportunities for automation and service improvement.
• Proven people-leadership capability including coaching, task allocation, performance follow-up, conflict management, and team development.
• Strong written and verbal English communication; Arabic is an advantage.