Director, AI Data Fabric Engineering

Ffive; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

F5 is seeking a senior engineering leader to guide the OpenTelemetry-based AI Data Fabric. The role owns the platform stack for ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval of telemetry, guiding expansion to more first-party data centers and cloud providers while ensuring scale and performance.

You will remain technically credible in architecture discussions, manage a growing team of managers, and partner with cross-functional leaders to align measurement needs with platform strategy.

Qualifications

• Be kind.
• Lead teams through ambiguity and change, turning ill-defined problems into clear priorities and plans.
• Influence cross-functional and executive stakeholders as a clear, candid communicator, and develop the people managers who report to you.
• Distributed compute and streaming at production scale: Kafka, Flink, Spark.
• Analytical storage and query engines at scale (ClickHouse, StarRocks, Druid, Trino) and open table formats (Iceberg, Delta).
• Kubernetes at production scale as a platform substrate: cluster and fleet management, scheduling, upgrades, and capacity.
• Hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure at production scale: two or more public clouds alongside on-premise or first-party data centers, with IaC, residency and sovereignty constraints, and workload portability.
• OpenTelemetry pipelines: collectors, semantic conventions, and configuration.
• Observability, alerting, and incident response for production data pipelines, including setting organizational standards.
• Data security and privacy for a production data platform.
• Working expertise in Golang, Java, Python, or C++, sufficient to engage credibly in technical reviews.

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and develop your engineering managers: set goals, coach for growth, evaluate performance, and hold each to a high technical and delivery bar.
• Drive exceptional delivery across your teams: allocate capacity to the highest-value work, track execution and surface risk early, and clear the cross-team dependencies no single manager can resolve.
• Partner with Product, Finance, SRE, Security, and engineering leadership to turn measurement needs into platform strategy and resourcing.
• Champion pragmatic AI use: deploy LLMs and other techniques that speed feedback loops safely, and have your managers cascade the practice.
• Measure everything, and hold yourself and your teams accountable to their commitments.

Skills

Be kind

Leading teams through ambiguity

Cross-functional communication

Distributed compute and streaming

Analytics storage and query engines

Kubernetes at production scale

Hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure

OpenTelemetry pipelines

Observability and incident response

Data security and privacy

Programming in Golang, Java, Python, C

Job description

F5 is seeking a senior engineering leader to guide the OpenTelemetry-based AI Data Fabric. The role owns the platform stack for ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval of telemetry, guiding expansion to more first-party data centers and cloud providers while ensuring scale and performance.

You will remain technically credible in architecture discussions, manage a growing team of managers, and partner with cross-functional leaders to align measurement needs with platform strategy.