Lead, Network Operations Center

Job Title: Lead, Network Operations Center

Location: Remote

About noon

We’re building an ecosystem of digital products and services that power everyday life across the Middle East—fast, scalable, and deeply customer-centric. Our mission is to deliver to every door every day. We want to redefine what technology can do in this region, and we’re looking for a Lead, Network Operations Center who can help us move even faster.

noon’s mission: Every door, every day.

What you'll do:

We are looking for an experienced and driven Lead, Network Operations Center (NOC), to lead our 24x7x365 NOC team at noon payments. This senior, ownership-focused role is responsible for ensuring the end-to-end operational health, reliability, and availability of our production cloud services across Azure, GCP, and Huawei Cloud environments.

The NOC Lead will be the single point of accountability for the NOC function, owning incident and problem management, driving process excellence, and serving as the key bridge between NOC operations and internal stakeholders. A core part of this role is end-to-end Datadog platform ownership, including administration, configuration, governance, and continuous optimization across all relevant capabilities.

The ideal candidate will bring strong experience in fintech or payments infrastructure, deep cloud monitoring expertise, proven leadership capability, and hands-on proficiency with observability tooling, particularly Datadog.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of NOC Specialists on a rotational 24x7x365 schedule, ensuring consistent coverage across weekends and public holidays.
• Act as the accountable owner for NOC operations, including shift handovers, escalation paths, performance reviews, and team training.
• Define, document, and enforce standard operating procedures (SOPs) for monitoring, alerting, escalation, and incident communication.
• Manage NOC staffing, shift planning, onboarding, training, performance management, and career development.
• Establish operational KPIs, SLAs, SLOs, and service reliability targets.
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and operational excellence.
• Oversee technical training of new NOC hires, ensuring consistency in skills and process adherence.

Incident & Problem Management

• Act as the primary escalation point for all P1/P2 incidents, leading bridge calls and coordinating with DevOps, Engineering, QA, and Integration & Support teams.
• Own the end-to-end incident management lifecycle, including detection, triage, resolution, communication, and post-incident review (PIR/RCA).
• Drive problem management practices to identify the root causes of recurring incidents and implement permanent fixes.
• Maintain and continuously improve MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) and system availability metrics.

Observability Ownership

• Own and administer the Datadog platform for noon payments across all relevant modules.
• Log Management: define log ingestion pipelines, retention policies, parsing rules, and log based alerting while retaining only operationally valuable logs to manage costs effectively.
• APM & Distributed Tracing: configure and manage application traces across fintech services to support performance monitoring and issue diagnosis.
• Dashboards & Monitors: build and maintain actionable dashboards and alert monitors for infrastructure, application, and business KPIs.
• Cost Governance - monitor Datadog usage and costs; optimize indexing, retention, and sampling to maintain budget efficiency.
• Integrations - configure and maintain integrations with Azure, GCP, Huawei Cloud, Kubernetes, and payment stack applications.

Fintech Production Operations

• Build a deep understanding of the noon payments ecosystem, including key payment flows, dependencies, and operational touchpoints.
• Monitor critical payment journeys, merchant services, settlement systems, and API platforms.
• Proactively identify business-impacting anomalies before they affect customers or merchants.
• Support bi-weekly production releases and validate observability readiness before go-live.

What you'll need:

Qualifications Required

• 5–8 years of overall experience in IT/cloud operations, with at least 2 years in a team lead or senior NOC/SRE role.
• Demonstrated experience in fintech, payments, or e-commerce environments is strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience managing a 24x7 operations team in a high-availability production environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline (or equivalent experience).
• ITIL Foundation or cloud certifications such as Azure or GCP are a plus.
• Working knowledge of Linux and Windows server environments.
• Basic scripting ability in Bash, Python, or PowerShell for operational task automation is a plus.
• Understanding of distributed, microservices-based architectures and common failure modes.

Who will excel?

• We’re looking for people with high standards, who understand that hard work matters.
• You need to be relentlessly resourceful and operate with a deep bias for action.
• We need people with the courage to be fiercely original.
• noon is not for everyone; readiness to adapt, pivot, and learn is essential.