Director of Engineering, AI Data Fabric

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

At F5, we strive to bring a better digital world to life. Our teams empower organizations across the globe to create, secure, and run applications that enhance how we experience our evolving digital world. We are passionate about cybersecurity, from protecting consumers from fraud to enabling companies to focus on innovation.

Everything we do centers around people. That means we obsess over how to make the lives of our customers, and their customers, better. And it means we prioritize a diverse F5 community where each individual can thrive.

Position Summary

This role leads the engineering organization behind the F5 AI Data Fabric: the OpenTelemetry based data platform that ingests, processes, transforms, stores, and serves telemetry from both internal and external sources across F5's businesses and platforms. AI/ML, analytics, and data engineering workloads across the company build on it, and it serves as F5's system of record for product measurement and customer usage.

You will lead its next evolution: extending the fabric into more first-party F5 data centers and additional cloud providers, making the AI Data Fabric even more available and performant. This expansion means processing exponentially more data, from more sources; you will guide the fabric and its team to meet the next scale moment.

Your organization owns the full modern data platform stack: ingestion, processing, transformation, storage, and retrieval. A partner team owns F5's data catalog, which builds on top of the fabric; you own the platform that catalog depends on and the contracts between you. You will stay technical enough to engage credibly in architecture discussions, unblock critical issues, and evaluate trade-offs, without serving as the primary hands-on contributor.

At F5, we strive to bring a better digital world to life. Our teams empower organizations across the globe to create, secure, and run applications that enhance how we experience our evolving digital world. We are passionate about cybersecurity, from protecting consumers from fraud to enabling companies to focus on innovation.

Everything we do centers around people. That means we obsess over how to make the lives of our customers, and their customers, better. And it means we prioritize a diverse F5 community where everyone can thrive.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Be kind.
• Lead teams through ambiguity and change, turning ill-defined problems into clear priorities and plans. Execution and results is the standard by which you judge yourself.
• 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, not a product surface: 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.

Primary Responsibilities

People and organization

• 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.

Strategy and technical direction

• Own the technical strategy, multi-year roadmap, and engineering standards, including build-versus-buy and core technology selection.
• Own vendor and licensing relationships: select partners, negotiate terms with Procurement and Finance, and hold vendors to their commitments.
• Lead the fabric's expansion across more first-party F5 data centers and additional cloud providers: phased regional rollout, residency requirements, and one coherent platform rather than per-environment forks.
• Own the platform contracts that AI/ML, analytics, data engineering, and the catalog team depend on, and prioritize onboardi