Network Operations Lead

Network Technical Operations Lead oversees and manages the daily operations and performance of an organization’s network infrastructure. This leadership role combines hands-on technical duties with strategic team management and cross-departmental coordination to ensure high availability, reliability, and ongoing optimization of the network environment. Responsibilities typically include:

·       Leading and mentoring the network operations team, providing technical direction, guidance, and performance feedback.

·       Overseeing design, implementation, and maintenance of LAN, WAN, wireless, and cloud network infrastructure.

·       Monitoring network performance, proactively identifying risks, and resolving incidents, outages, or degradations rapidly.

·       Developing and enforcing operational procedures, security policies, and best practices.

·       Planning and executing network upgrades, configuration changes, and capacity forecasting.

·       Collaborating with IT, application, and business teams to align network services with organizational needs and projects.

·       Coordinating with external vendors, service providers, and support teams to ensure smooth service delivery and escalated issue resolution.

·       Maintaining up-to-date technical documentation, operational reports, and performance dashboards.

·       Acting as a technical escalation point for complex network issues, major incidents, and post-incident reviews.

·       Ensuring the team adheres to SLAs, compliance requirements, and change management protocols.

·       This role requires strong technical expertise in networking (e.g., Cisco, Juniper, cloud), leadership and communication skills, and a commitment to continuous improvement and operational excellence.

Typical total experience

·       Overall IT/networking: 15+ years of experience working with large scale enterprise networks 

·       In network operations/NOC: At least 4–6 years focused on operations, incident response, and troubleshooting, including on call.

·       In leadership/lead role: 2–5 years leading a team or acting as technical lead, handling escalations, mentoring, and driving process improvements.

Depth and type of experience expected

·       Managing medium to large, multi-site networks (campus, data center, WAN/SD WAN, wireless, firewalls) with high availability requirements.

·       Strong track record with major incidents: running bridges, coordinating with multiple teams, doing root cause analysis, and implementing preventive measures.

·       Experience implementing and operating monitoring/observability, change management, and automation tools in production environments.

·       Vendor and stakeholder management: working with ISPs, hardware/software vendors, and internal business owners on SLAs, projects, and escalations.

·       Cisco Nexus, ACI,

Typical seniority indicators

·       Has designed or significantly re-architected parts of the network (e.g., SD WAN rollout, data center refresh, cloud connectivity).

·       Acts as final technical escalation point for complex issues and is trusted to make go/no go decisions for risky changes.

·       Demonstrable history of improving KPIs like MTTR, availability, change success rate, and incident volumes through process and tooling improvements.

·       Current years of experience and tech stack (e.g., Cisco SDN, SD-WAN, Nexus, Wireless, DNA SDA, Catalyst Center), a gap analysis against a typical Network Technical Operations Lead profile can be outlined.

·       In depth understanding of NMS and ITSM tools to leverage them for effective and efficient operations

Certifications:

·       CCIE or equivalent level certification in routing, switching and wireless