NOC Team Lead - AI Infrastructure

Hamilton Barnes; West of England; On-site; GBP 48,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Ownership of NOC from day one

Clear career progression

Autonomy with leadership exposure

Job summary

Hamilton Barnes is seeking a NOC Team Lead to build the Network Operations Centre from scratch for a fast-growing AI infrastructure project near Bristol. You’ll lead a 24x7 shift-based team handling network, power, environmental, server and GPU alerts, with a strong focus on incident management and continuous improvement.

The role requires calm leadership under pressure, hands-on monitoring, and the ability to scale processes as the data-centre estate expands in the coming years.

Qualifications

• Experience in a NOC, data-centre operations, or infrastructure support with prior shift lead or team lead responsibility.
• Strong networking triage and incident management capabilities; Linux admin basics.
• Familiarity with ITSM/ticketing tools such as HaloITSM, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management or similar.

Responsibilities

• Lead a 24x7 NOC team, providing first/second-line support across network, power, environmental, server and GPU infra alerts.
• Own shift rotas, coverage planning and handovers for continuous operation.
• Escalate to engineering, field operations or vendors; manage major incidents and outages.

Skills

NOC leadership

Networking triage

Linux admin

Incident management

UK driving licence

Tools

HaloITSM

ServiceNow

Jira Service Management

FreshService

Job description

Are you looking for an exciting new opportunity?

Join a high-growth, renewable-powered AI infrastructure developer turning brownfield sites into resilient, lower-carbon, high-performance data centres for the UK’s AI transformation. Alongside delivering ultra-fast AI capacity, the organization supports regeneration and brings new investment into the communities around its sites.

This is a great opportunity for a NOC Team Lead to build the Network Operations Centre from the ground up, setting the standard for how the team monitors, triages, and escalates across a rapidly expanding GPU and data centre estate. The ideal candidate will lead a shift-based team acting as the first point of technical response for customer-facing services, as a multi-megawatt data centre goes live later this year and a strong pipeline of further sites develops.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and coach a 24x7 NOC team providing first and second-line support across network, power, environmental, server and GPU infrastructure alerts, ensuring SLA adherence
• Own shift rotas, handovers and coverage planning, balancing workload and resilience across a round-the-clock operation
• Act as the senior escalation point for incident triage, directing escalation to engineering, field operations, Smart Hands providers or vendors, and taking command of major incidents
• Lead outage management and root cause analysis, turning findings into continuous improvement across monitoring, alerting and process
• Design, document and maintain NOC processes, runbooks and knowledge articles, setting the standard for ticket quality and documentation
• Manage relationships with Smart Hands and field engineering partners, coordinating site access, dispatch and maintenance windows, and reporting on team performance and service health to leadership

Skills/Must Have:

• Proven experience in a NOC, data-centre operations, managed services or infrastructure support environment, including time as a shift lead, senior engineer or team lead with direct oversight of others
• Strong networking triage, troubleshooting and escalation capability; Linux systems administration knowledge; solid understanding of data-centre hardware (racking, cabling, power and cooling fundamentals)
• Confident running incident and major incident management, with hands-on experience of an ITSM/ticketing tool such as HaloITSM, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, FreshService or similar
• Calm, decisive leadership under pressure, with the ability to coach, motivate and hold a shift-based team to a high standard; comfortable operating autonomously and presenting to senior stakeholders. Must hold a full UK driving licence, live within roughly an hour of Bristol, and be open to achieving Security Clearance within the next 12 months

Desirable Skills:

• Experience building or scaling a NOC, or standing up new processes in a start-up or high-growth environment
• Experience or interest in AI infrastructure, HPC or GPU environments
• Exposure to Grafana, Prometheus, SolarWinds, Zabbix, Datadog, CloudWatch or similar monitoring tools
• Basic Bash or Python scripting for automation
• ITIL certification, or a background in cloud, hosting, MSP or wider infrastructure operations

Benefits:

• Build a NOC from scratch rather than inherit someone else’s legacy setup, with genuine ownership of how monitoring, escalation, shift patterns and runbooks are designed from day one.
• Get in early at a business scaling from 60+ staff towards 80 to 100 by the end of 2026 and 2 to 3x growth over the following 18 to 24 months, with a clear path to grow your team and your remit alongside it.
• High visibility with senior leadership from day one, real autonomy in how you run the function, and the chance to coach a mixed skills matrix where network-heavy and infrastructure-heavy engineers develop through knowledge transfer from each other.

Salary:

• Up to £80k