Networks – Operations Controller

Description

Position Summary 

The Networks – Operations Controller (NOC) provides critical support to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) under the Integrated Research and Development for Enterprise Solutions (IRES) contract. This role is responsible for monitoring, managing, and maintaining network operations to ensure the availability, reliability, and security of mission-critical systems. The NOC serves as the first line of defense in identifying and resolving network issues, coordinating with technical teams, and implementing operational procedures to maintain optimal performance across enterprise environments. The position requires strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, mission-focused setting.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Provide real time operational control and service assurance for enterprise networks that support DoD missions (IL4/5/6). 
• Monitor network health and dependencies, leads incident response bridges, enforces change controls, and drives continuous improvement against SLAs/SLOs across data center, campus/branch, WAN/SD WAN, and boundary security segments.

Monitoring & Incident Response:

• Maintain 24×7 situational awareness of network health (availability, latency, loss, jitter, capacity, link/path status).
• Triage, contain, and restore service during incidents using documented runbooks/playbooks; coordinate swarming with
• Routing/Switching, Boundary Security, Platform, and Cyber teams.
• Execute initial impact assessment, user/stakeholder communications, workarounds, and continuity steps, capture timelines and decisions for post incident review.

Event & Observability Management:

• Operate dashboards, alerts, and synthetic/active tests; tune thresholds to reduce noise while protecting SLOs.
• Correlate telemetry (syslog, SNMP/streaming telemetry, NetFlow/IPFIX, route/adjacency state) with actionable escalation paths.
• Validate monitoring for new or changed network services (health checks and alerts in place before go live). 

Change, Release & Configuration Control:

• Enforce CAB/CCB decisions, maintenance windows, freeze periods, and back out plans for network changes.
• Verify pre change readiness (peer review, approvals, rollback tested, comms prepared) and confirm post change health.
• Keep CMDB/CIs and topology/dependency maps current, record changes and relationships for traceability.

Problem, Availability & Capacity Management:

• Lead problem investigations (recurring incidents, trend spikes); run root cause analysis (RCA) and durable corrective actions.
• Track availability, MTTR/MTBF, error budgets, and capacity trends; recommend scaling, policy tuning, or resiliency patterns (path diversity, ECMP, QoS adjustments).
• Drive backlog items with owners and verify closure via effectiveness checks.

Boundary Security & Compliance (Operations):

• Execute patch/vulnerability windows for boundary devices per plan; validate policy deployments and change results.
• Operate within RMF/DISA STIG constraints; preserve audit trails and evidence for assessments and ATO/cATO sustainment.
• Coordinate with Cyber/Blue Team on detections, containment steps, and after-action improvements.

Service Level Management & Reporting:

• Measure and report SLAs/SLOs (site availability, ticket KPIs, change success, incident induced change rate) with daily/weekly/monthly executive rollups.
• Maintain stakeholder communications for incidents, maintenance, and changes throughout the event lifecycle.

Knowledge & Documentation:

• Author/maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, operational standards, KEDB (Known Error DB), and service catalogs; keep knowledge articles current.
• Contribute to readiness reviews, go live checklists, and lessons learned, coach junior controllers and cross train peers.

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities)

• Must have, or obtain within 90 days of hire, a DoD 8570 compliant certification (e.g., Security+).
• Must have, or obtain, an active DoD Secret Security Clearance
• Must have 14, or more, years of general (full-time) work experience
• May be reduced with advanced education
• Must have 7, or more, years of Network experience
• Must have 1, or more, years of experience working in a management or leadership role
• Must have 3, or more, years in network operations/NOC for large enterprise or DoD environments.
• Must have a solid grasp of L2/L3 fundamentals (VLANs