Network Operations Center Engineer II

Alation is pioneering the next era of data intelligence, powered by AI agents and trusted data. Organizations around the world rely on Alation to drive self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI innovation.

About the Role

We're looking for a hands-on NOC Engineer who can also handle security monitoring and incidents. You'll monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve issues across our AWS and Kubernetes environments, respond to security alerts, and automate repetitive work, thinking clearly under pressure and owning incidents end to end.

Network / Cloud Operations (NOC)

• Monitor the health, availability and performance of AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, applications and networks, 24x7 on a rotational basis.
• Act as L2 escalation point: triage, troubleshoot, debug and resolve incidents escalated from L1 or raised by monitoring tools.
• Analyze logs, metrics and traces to find root causes across compute, network, storage, database and application layers.
• Troubleshoot Kubernetes workloads (pods, deployments, services, ingress, nodes) using kubectl and related tools.
• Escalate to engineering, cloud and vendor teams with clear, complete technical context when needed.
• Tune alerts and dashboards to reduce noise and improve signal quality.
• Support change, maintenance and release windows, including validation and rollback checks.

Security Operations (SOC)

• Monitor security alerts from SIEM, cloud security tools (e.g., AWS GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail) and endpoint/network sources.
• Triage, investigate and classify security events; separate false positives from real threats.
• Execute first response on security incidents: containment, evidence collection, escalation and follow-up.
• Identify suspicious activity such as unauthorized access, IAM misuse, unusual network traffic, malware or data exfiltration indicators.
• Follow and improve security incident response playbooks.
• Support vulnerability management, access reviews and audit evidence requests.

Automation and Continuous Improvement

• Automate repetitive operational and security tasks using scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go, etc.) or low-code / no-code tools (e.g., n8n, Zapier, Power Automate, SOAR platforms, Lambda, AWS Systems Manager).
• Build auto-remediation, alert enrichment and ticket auto-creation workflows.
• Write and maintain runbooks, SOPs and knowledge base articles.
• Identify recurring issues and drive problem management to permanent fixes.

Incident, Ticketing and ITIL Process

• Manage incidents, service requests, problems and changes in ticketing tools (e.g., Jira Service Management, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Opsgenie).
• Meet SLAs for acknowledgement, response and resolution.
• Lead or support major incident bridges; provide clear status updates to stakeholders.
• Write post-incident reviews / RCAs with action items.
• Provide clean, documented shift handovers.

Required Skills and Qualifications

Strong communication and team coordination are mandatory. Security monitoring/incident response, automation, and troubleshooting/debugging are critical. AWS fundamentals, observability tooling, and ITIL/ticketing experience are high priority. Kubernetes is medium-to-high priority; coding in any language is a plus.

Specifically, we're looking for:

• Hands-on security experience (SIEM tools, AWS security services, awareness of MITRE ATT&CK/OWASP Top 10)
• A track record of automating manual work (scripting or low-code/no-code)
• Working AWS knowledge (VPC, EC2, IAM, CloudWatch, etc.) and Kubernetes (EKS preferred)
• Strong troubleshooting ability and comfort with Linux CLI
• 3-6 years in NOC, SOC, cloud ops, or SRE/DevOps support, with ITIL and ticketing experience
• Bachelor's degree in CS/IT/Electronics or equivalent experience

Good to Have

AWS/Security certifications (Security+, CEH, CKA), SOAR platform experience, Terraform/Git basics, and exposure to SOC 2/ISO 27001/GDPR.

Behavioral Competencies

Calm under pressure, strong communicator, ownership mindset, quick learner open to cross-training across NOC and SOC, and documents/hands over work cleanly.

Shift and Work Conditions

Rotational 24x5 today, expanding to 24x6/24x7. Includes night/weekend shifts and on-call per roster, with shift allowance and comp-off per policy.