NOC Engineer

Job Description

Position Summary The NOC Engineer is responsible for the day-to-day monitoring and initial response for critical customer systems. This role owns the operational rhythm of detection triage and escalation - ensuring that actionable alerts are handled quickly criticality is assessed correctly and customer impact is minimized. The NOC Engineer is a hands-on technical operator who uses the organizations monitoring and remote management platforms (and associated workflows) to validate alerts perform first-response troubleshooting and coordinate escalations. This role is also accountable for improving monitoring quality over time by reducing noise validating coverage on critical assets and keeping documentation and runbooks current.

Key Responsibilities Monitoring & Triage (Primary Responsibility)

• Monitor customer environments for availability performance and security-impacting events using established monitoring platforms and alerting workflows.
• Assess alert criticality and customer impact (what is down who is impacted and how urgent it is) and act accordingly.
• Perform first-response validation to distinguish true positives from noise (for example: confirm reachability service status interface state and power/ISP indicators).
• Open update and manage tickets for monitoring events ensuring accurate categorization priority and timestamps.
• Maintain situational awareness during active incidents (multiple concurrent alerts cascading failures ISP/power events).

Contract and Fiancial Management

• Participate in the review and execution of software contracts and renewals. Ensure favorable commercial and legal terms are achieved.
• Analyze total cost of ownership (TCO) for software investments and drive tangible cost reduction initiatives through planning and execution.
• Develop expertise in software volume licensing models and commercial structures.

Monitoring Quality Coverage and Noise Reduction

• Own the accuracy of monitoring for critical assets: ensure the right devices and services are monitored with appropriate thresholds and dependencies.
• Identify recurring false positives and work with the team to tune alert rules maintenance windows and notification routing.
• Verify monitoring visibility for newly onboarded or replaced systems and ensure decommissioned assets are removed from monitoring.
• Contribute to proactive improvements such as standardized monitoring templates and reducing repeat alert patterns.

Documentation & Process Adherence

• Document all actions and findings in the ticketing system using established standards (clear notes evidence timestamps and outcomes).
• Maintain and improve NOC runbooks and quick-reference procedures for common alert types and incident patterns.
• Follow change management and customer communication procedures during remediation and incident response.

Tool Operations & Operational Hygiene

• Maintain operational hygiene in monitoring systems: correct naming conventions site mappings device grouping and alert routing.
• Verify that alerts are producing tickets/notifications as designed; report and document delivery failures for engineering remediation.
• Support periodic cycle counts or health checks to ensure monitoring is aligned with current customer environments.

Key Performance Goals

• Alert Triage: 90% of actionable alerts validated and ticketed within 15 minutes during business hours.
• Critical Outage Triage: Initial validation and escalation/engagement within 30 minutes for confirmed critical outages.
• Documentation Quality: 100% of monitoring-related tickets include clear validation steps actions taken and next steps.
• Noise Reduction: Demonstrate measurable reduction in recurring false-positive alerts month-over-month (tracked via top alert categories).
• Monitoring Coverage: 100% of defined critical assets have validated monitoring coverage and correct criticality classification.

Minimum Qualifications

• 2 years in a NOC or technical operations environment.
• Experience triaging monitoring alerts and identifying customer impact using structured validation.
• Working knowledge of monitoring and remote management tooling and standard incident workflows.
• Strong troubleshooting skills and ability to distinguish symptoms from root cause through structured validation.
• Strong written communication skills in a ticketing system.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with alert tuning and threshold design to reduce noise.
• Basic scripting/automation skills (PowerShell and/or Python) to support operational efficiencies.
• Certifications such as Network Security CCNA or equivalent experience.