Position Sumary:

The NOC Manager is responsible for the day-to-day leadership, performance, and continuous improvement of Global Data Systems’ Network Operations Center. This role ensures 24×7 monitoring, incident response, escalation management, and service reliability for managed services customers while enforcing standardized processes, operational discipline, and SLA accountability.

The NOC Manager serves as the primary operational owner for NOC outcomes, balancing people leadership, technical oversight, customer impact, and cross-team coordination with Service Desk, Security, Cloud, and Professional Services teams.

Key Responsibilities

Operational Leadership

• Own daily NOC operations across all shifts (day, night, weekends), ensuring consistent coverage, handoffs, and workload balancing.
• Enforce adherence to NOC SOPs, escalation timelines, and on-call procedures. 
• Act as the escalation point for P1/P2 incidents, major outages, and customer-impacting events.
• Ensure every NOC ticket has clear ownership, timely updates, and proper documentation before shift handoff.

Incident & Escalation Management

• Lead response for high-severity incidents, coordinating with carriers, vendors, customers, and internal engineering teams.
• Ensure root cause analysis (RCA) is completed for major incidents and corrective actions are tracked to completion.
• Maintain and improve incident escalation paths between NOC, Service Desk, Security, and leadership.

Team Leadership & Development

• Manage, coach, and develop NOC engineers across tiers and shifts (including night shift staff).
• Set clear expectations around performance, accountability, and professional growth.
• Partner with leadership on hiring, onboarding, scheduling, and succession planning.
• Conduct regular performance check-ins and contribute to career pathing for NOC engineers.

Process & Continuous Improvement

• Identify operational gaps and drive improvements in monitoring, alerting, ticket workflows, and shift processes.
• Standardize repeatable work to reduce noise, improve first-touch resolution, and protect senior engineering capacity.
• Maintain and improve NOC documentation, SOPs, and runbooks in coordination with Service Desk leadership.

Metrics, Reporting & SLAs

• Track and report on key NOC performance metrics (e.g., ticket aging, SLA compliance, incident volume, escalation trends).
• Provide clear operational insights and recommendations to leadership.
• Use data to drive staffing decisions, tooling improvements, and process changes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Service Desk, Security Operations, Cloud, and Professional Services teams to ensure seamless customer experience.
• Coordinate with carrier and vendor partners during outages, dispatches, and maintenance windows.
• Support leadership initiatives related to scale, automation, and operational maturity

 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a Network Operations Center, Managed Services, or similar 24×7 operations environment.
• 2+ years of people management or team-lead experience in an IT operations role.
• Strong working knowledge of: 
  • Network monitoring and alerting tools
  • Incident and escalation management
  • Ticketing systems and ITSM workflows
  • Networking fundamentals (circuits, firewalls, VPNs, ISPs, connectivity)
• Proven ability to manage high-pressure incidents and make sound operational decisions.
• Strong communication skills with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a managed services provider (MSP) environment.
• Familiarity with security operations and firewall/VPN troubleshooting.
• Experience building or refining SOPs, escalation models, and shift-based workflows.
• ITIL or relevant technical certifications (preferred, not required).