Major Incident Manager

Job Title: Major Incident Management (MIM) & NOC Lead (10 Years)

Location: Onsite – Wilmington, DE (Day1 Onsite)

Employment Type: Full-time

Experience: 10 years in IT Operations / NOC / Major Incident Management, including

Role Summary:

The Major Incident Management & NOC Lead is responsible for end-to-end command and control of the enterprise’s 24x7 operational monitoring and incident response. This role leads the MIM and NOC function, drives Major Incident (P1/P2) execution, ensures rapid service restoration, and continuously improves operational maturity through problem management, automation, observability enhancements, and SLA governance.

This role requires a mix of strong incident leadership, technical depth across infrastructure and applications, and people/process management to ensure stability, availability, and performance across critical services.

Key Responsibilities:

A) Major Incident Management (Command & Control)

• Own the Major Incident (P1/P2) process from detection to resolution, including war-room leadership, stakeholder updates, and closure.
• Act as the Incident Commander and ensure structured triage, containment, workaround, and restoration.
• Drive cross-functional coordination (App, Infra, Network, Security, DB, Cloud, Vendor teams) to reduce MTTR.
• Ensure high-quality incident communications: executive summaries, impact analysis, ETAs, customer/business comms.
• Lead and facilitate Post Incident Reviews (PIR/RCA); ensure actionable corrective/preventive actions (CAPA).
• Identify recurring issues and trigger Problem Management with measurable reduction plans.

B) NOC Leadership & Operations

• Lead the NOC team responsible for 24x7 monitoring, alert triage, event correlation, escalation, and ticket quality.
• Establish/maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs), runbooks, escalation matrices, and on-call models.
• Ensure NOC meets SLAs/OLAs, improves alert fidelity, and reduces noise through tuning and automation.
• Manage handover governance between shifts; maintain service continuity and operational hygiene.

C) Service Reliability & Continuous Improvement

• Drive operational improvements: monitoring coverage, SLO/SLA alignment, incident prevention, and resiliency initiatives.
• Partner with Engineering/Platform teams on observability strategy, proactive detection, and reliability patterns.
• Track and report operational metrics: MTTD, MTTR, incident volume, re-open rate, SLA compliance, and trends.
• Support readiness for audits and compliance: evidence collection, process adherence, and risk mitigation.

D) Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Interface with business stakeholders, service owners, and leadership to provide incident status, risk, and remediation plans.
• Manage vendor escalations and ensure timely resolution aligned to contractual SLAs.

E) Managerial / Leadership Skills (Must Have)

• Proven experience leading MIM & NOC Operations teams (shift-based or on-call models).
• Strong Incident Commander capability: calm under pressure, structured decision-making, priority trade-offs.
• Excellent stakeholder management across technical teams and business leadership.
• Ability to build and enforce process discipline (ITIL-aligned), while improving speed and quality.
• Strong coaching/mentoring: performance management, skill development, hiring support as needed.
• Effective communication: concise executive updates, clear action plans, facilitation of PIR/RCA sessions.
• Data-driven mindset: uses metrics and trend analysis to drive operational outcomes.

Technical Skills (Must Have):

A) Monitoring / Observability

• Hands-on experience with NOC tooling and observability platforms such as:
• Splunk / ELK, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, AppDynamics
• Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch/Azure Monitor
• Strong understanding of event correlation, alert tuning, noise reduction, and dashboarding.

B) Incident / ITSM Platforms

• Strong working knowledge of ServiceNow (Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge, CMDB) or equivalent ITSM tools.
• Experience designing workflows, SLAs/OLAs, routing rules, and automation integrations.

C) Infrastructure & Platform Breadth

• Solid understanding across:
• Windows/Linux administration basics
• Network fundamentals (DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, routing, load balancers, firewalls)
• Compute/virtualization (VMware/Hyper-V) and storage concepts
• Databases fundamentals (SQL/Oracle, replication, performance symptoms)
• Cloud fundamentals and operational support for AWS/Azure/GCP:
• IAM basics, networking (VPC/VNet), scaling, logging/monitoring, common failure patterns.

D) Automation & Scripting (Good to Have / Preferred)

• Scripting knowledge: PowerShell / Python / Bash
• Familiarity with automation tools: Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD operational workflows.
• Ability to create/maintain runbook automation and self-healing patterns.

E) Security & Resilience (Preferred)

• Awareness of security operations touchpoints: DDoS symptoms, certificate expiries, IAM issues, endpoint/EDR alerts.
• Familiarity with BCP/DR processes, failover testing, and resilience design collaboration.

F) ITIL / Process Expectations

• Strong ITIL understanding across Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge, and Service Level Management.
• Ability to implement governance around:
• Change risk assessment, change windows, incident-change correlation
• RCA quality, action item tracking, and effectiveness validation

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science / IT / Engineering or equivalent experience.
• ITIL v4 Foundation (preferred).
• Cloud certifications (preferred): AWS/Azure fundamentals or associate level.
• Experience in enterprise production environments with stringent availability requirements.

Success Metrics / KPIs

• Reduced MTTD and MTTR for P1/P2 incidents.
• Improved SLA compliance and reduction in escalation breaches.
• Reduced repeat incidents via problem management and preventive actions.
• Improved alert quality: lower false positives, better signal-to-noise ratio.
• Strong PIR/RCA compliance: on-time RCAs with measurable preventive outcomes.
• Improved NOC operational maturity: SOP adherence, shift handover quality, audit readiness.

Nice-to-Have Industry Contexts

• Transportation / financial services / healthcare / e-commerce / SaaS environments with high availability targets.
• Experience supporting microservices, Kubernetes, and distributed systems.