A Day in the Life of... Ariane Nichols, NOC Team Leader

// Name and location
Ariane Nichols, Earth, Texas

// What is your position?
I’m a NOC (Network Operations Center) Team Leader at NoTraffic. There are 5 team leaders at our Operations team, and I manage three VMC (Virtual Management Center) Operators, who are responsible for the smooth operation of several traffic corridors on major US cities. On an average day my team oversee some 500,000 vehicles passing through these corridors.

// What’s the 1st thing you do each morning?
Grab coffee and open my calendar. I’m part of a global team, providing 24/7 support to our customers, for a critical layer of everyone’s lives – our roads. So each morning I set goals and priorities for the day, accommodating my schedule to our customers’. We’re truly a customer-obsessed company.

// What does your office setup look like? What tools and software you cannot live without?
My laptop (Asus VivoBook) and my Galaxy S10 are a must. The top tools I use on a daily basis are Gmail, Slack, Whatsapp, and the NoTraffic Dashboard of course 🙂

// When did you join NoTraffic and why?
I joined in December 2019, pre-COVID. The startup scene sounded exactly like what I had been searching for, the people were amazing and the product is fascinating.

// What’s the most mis-understood thing about your job?
That it is filled with idle time. A lot of people think that being a NOC Team Leader is like being a Doctor on-call, and if there isn’t an emergency, I can chill in the Doctor’s Lounge… In reality, working at a NOC is more about preventive monitoring, optimization, and fast paced resolutions. We also spend a lot of time digging through the system for information that can be beneficiary for both our customers and for our Dev & Product teams.

// Why would you recommend people to join you?
Definitely the people. You will never work with a more amazing group of people.

// What’s your favorite hobby, how a typical weekend looks like?
I love hiking, going out to the wild with my kids almost every weekend! Our favorite parks are Skyline Regional, Joshua Tree National Park, and now with our recent move to Texas a whole lot more to discover.

// How do you spend your time commuting to work?
One of the best parts of my work – no commute! I work from my home-office, even before COVID the company offered this flexibility, which made my decision to join even easier.