1st Line NOC Team Lead

1st Line NOC Team Lead

Department: Managed Services

Employment Type: Permanent

Location: Remote, UK

Description

• Shift Patterns: Dual shifts - Day Shift 08:00 to 16:30 and Night Shift 21:30 to 06:00, alternating every two weeks.
• Location: This role will be working remotely for the foreseeable future; we plan to open a new office in West Yorkshire, but no timeframes have been set.

Role Description

• As a 1st Line NOC Team Lead, you will combine strong technical support capabilities with leadership responsibility during your assigned shift.
• You will act as the team leader on shift, 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 more complex networking and security incidents escalated from initial triage, providing advanced troubleshooting, resolution leadership, advanced configurations, and proactive optimisation to ensure secure, reliable, high performance customer network infrastructure.
• You minimise further escalations through deep expertise and lead major incidents (P1, Major Incidents, 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. Incidents and service requests are managed via ServiceNow (our Single Pane of Glass), email, live chat, and phone, with detailed updates, stakeholder communication, and strict SLA/OLA adherence.
• The NOC maintains specialisms in Connect (traditional telecoms connectivity) and Secure (secure networking solutions). You support both areas, with primary focus based on shift/team allocation, but provide overflow and out of hours expertise across the full portfolio, including Secure products during non core hours when required.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and support the team on shift.
• Act as the on shift team leader, overseeing case queues, workload allocation/distribution, and resource prioritisation to balance volumes and meet SLAs.
• Monitor queue trends, spot emerging issues or imbalances, and adjust allocations proactively to optimise team performance and prevent bottlenecks.
• Support escalations within the team, act as the key technical escalation point to higher levels, and review triage quality before escalation.
• Conduct regular 1 2 1s with team members to discuss performance, development, blockers, and wellbeing.
• Review case QA outputs and individual case handling to ensure results align with best practice guides, NOC Charter expectations, and quality standards; provide constructive feedback and coaching.
• Mentor team members, facilitate knowledge sharing via pairing, shadowing, and training contributions.
• 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, chasing resolver groups and setting 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.
• Continuous Improvement & Leadership Contribution.
• Support 1st Line NOC Manager on all improvement initiatives and requirements.
• Lead identification of systemic/recurring issues and improvement opportunities around people, process and systems.
• Contribute significantly to the knowledge base, training materials, and skills development.
• Mentor on progression paths, qualifications, and technical growth.
• Provide detailed feedback/proposals to leadership on efficiencies, tooling, automation, and customer experience.
• Drive root cause elimination and scalable solutions with higher level teams.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise Knowledge

• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals (OSI model, TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, routing, switching, Secure Networking - SD WAN, SASE)

Have obtained or have a willingness to obtain

• 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, including 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

What you can expect from us: At Nasstar, we know the importance of looking after our employees - after all, it's the team that underpins our business!

In addition to a competitive salary, supportive teams, and a real opportunity to progress in your career with a forward thinking organisation, our benefits package includes:

• 25 days' holiday (excluding bank holidays) + Your Birthday Off
• Flexible working - it's important to maintain a work/life balance, as such, we will consider any written request for flexible working
• Virtual working - we practice what we preach and empower our people to work remotely
• Top tech - Leading services and solutions aren't just for our clients; we supply best of breed software and hardware for all our staff too
• 4x annual salary life assurance
• Health cash plan
• Retail discounts and other perks from major brands