1st Line NOC Team Lead

Responsibilities

• Combine strong technical support capabilities with leadership responsibility during your assigned shift.
• Act as the shift leader, overseeing case queues, workload allocation, escalations, SLA compliance, and trend identification to maintain balanced and efficient queue volumes.
• Ensure the team delivers high-quality support aligned with NOC Charter principles, best practice guides, and customer excellence standards.
• Take ownership of complex networking and security incidents escalated from initial triage, providing advanced troubleshooting, resolution leadership, advanced configurations, and proactive optimisation to secure, reliable, high-performance customer network infrastructure.
• Lead major incidents (P1, major service incidents) operationally and technically during out-of-hours or high-priority scenarios, delegating tasks, coordinating with the major incident team, project/account managers, and managed service leaders for timely resolution.
• Mentor and support the team, review case QA outputs, conduct 1-2-1s with team members, and ensure case results reflect the expectations in our best practice guides and NOC Charter.
• Collaborate with higher-level engineers, vendors, and suppliers on root-cause analysis, permanent fixes, knowledge sharing, and service improvements.
• Manage incidents and service requests via ServiceNow, email, live chat, and phone, providing detailed updates, stakeholder communication, and strict SLA/OLA adherence.
• Support both Connect (traditional telecoms connectivity) and Secure (secure networking solutions) specialisms, with primary focus based on shift/team allocation, and provide overflow and out-of-hours expertise across the full portfolio.
• Oversee case queues, workload distribution, and resource prioritisation to balance volumes and meet SLAs; monitor queue trends, spot emerging issues, and adjust allocations proactively; support escalations within the team and review triage quality before escalation.
• Take full ownership of complex cases out of hours, leading resolution efforts and coordinating with higher-level teams, vendors, and suppliers; document all steps, root causes, actions, and outcomes thoroughly for knowledge reuse and audits.
• Drive cases to permanent resolution or stable workarounds, chase resolver groups and set clear expectations.
• Manage dynamic workloads under pressure with strong prioritisation, risk assessment, and ITIL adherence.
• Monitor and resolve network/security issues via ServiceNow, LogicMonitor, and other tools; lead investigations for minimal customer impact.
• Handle advanced requests out of hours (e.g., complex firewall rules, SD-WAN policies, VPN tunnels, firmware upgrades).
• Proactively identify optimisations, performance tuning, and security hardening.
• Support 1st Line NOC Manager on improvement initiatives and requirements, lead identification of systemic/recurring issues, contribute to the knowledge base, training materials, and skills development; mentor on progression paths and provide detailed feedback to leadership on efficiencies, tooling, automation, and customer experience.

Knowledge

• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals (OSI model, TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, routing, switching, Secure Networking – SD-WAN, SASE).
• Practical experience with network monitoring tools (LogicMonitor) and ticketing systems (ServiceNow).
• In-depth knowledge of Cisco IOS commands, configuration, and troubleshooting (routing/switching).
• Solid expertise in Fortinet firewall/security concepts (policies, NAT, VPN, UTM features).
• Working knowledge of Juniper, Cisco Meraki, Alcatel-Lucent, HPE/Aruba switching/LAN technologies.
• Experience with MPLS, VPN technologies, remote access solutions, SASE and SD-WAN deployments.
• Strong grasp of ITIL/ITOM frameworks, including Incident, Problem, and Change Management, and the capability to lead on such processes.

Skills

• Advanced troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex, multi-vendor network/security issues.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management (customers, internal teams, vendors).
• Strong time management, prioritisation, and decision-making in high-pressure environments.
• Analytical skills for log analysis, packet captures, performance metrics, and trend identification.

Education

• IT-related qualification or training (e.g., CompTIA Network+, Cisco CCNA, Fortinet FCA).

Benefits

• 25 days holiday (excluding bank holidays) + Birthday Off.
• Flexible working – we consider requests for flexible working.
• Virtual working – remote options.
• Top tech – best-of-breed software and hardware for staff.
• 4× annual salary life assurance.
• Health cash plan.
• Retail discounts and perks from major brands.