Director, Commercial Legal (Cloud & SaaS)

F5 Networks•San Jose, CA

About The Position

F5 is seeking a strategic, business-minded Director, Commercial Legal to join their North American commercial legal team. This role focuses on high-impact cloud contracting challenges, accelerating enterprise deal velocity, and shaping the product roadmap of a global leader. The position involves designing scalable legal frameworks, establishing global precedent for emerging SaaS offerings, driving proactive business enablement, and aligning enterprise legal strategy with product innovation. The legal team operates as a strategic partner in driving business growth, with success measured by deal momentum and transactional efficiency. The role offers collaboration with senior business and legal leaders to scale F5 globally and support rapid SaaS market expansion.

Requirements

Juris Doctor (J.D.) from an accredited law school and active bar membership in good standing in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.
10+ years of relevant legal experience, including significant in-house experience negotiating enterprise SaaS, cloud platform, and data processing agreements within peer technology companies, cloud-native competitors, or established enterprise vendors.
Strong practical understanding of privacy, cybersecurity, AI governance, and emerging technology and AI regulations, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS 4.0, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR and U.S. state privacy law, the EU AI Act and DORA.
Deep understanding of the SaaS business model, subscription economics, and market-standard contractual expectations, including DPAs, SLA structures, and liability standards common among major SaaS providers.
Proven track record as a business enabler who prioritizes commercial velocity, with the ability to evaluate risk through a commercial lens and offer creative, practical solutions.
Ability to credibly discuss concepts like data residency, tenancy, encryption, and telemetry with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and translate them into contractual language.
Proven ability to build trusted relationships across executive leadership, sales, product management, and engineering teams.
Ability to mentor junior legal team members and direct experience managing or leading contract managers or other legal professionals.
Comfort with ambiguity in a fast-paced, evolving multi-cloud landscape, with the initiative to build playbooks from the ground up where standard precedents do not yet exist.

Responsibilities

Drive and close high-value enterprise SaaS transactions with regulated Fortune 500 customers, often negotiated on the customer's own paper.
Focus on transactional efficiency, reducing sales friction, and closing deals quickly while managing material risk.
Partner with Product Management, Information Security, and Product Counsel during early-stage product design to translate complex cloud infrastructure concepts into clear, defensible commercial terms.
Collaborate with legal and business leaders to identify, escalate, and resolve systemic commercial negotiation blockers.
Lead a team of two commercial contract managers serving as global subject matter experts for F5 SaaS transactions.
Guide commercial attorneys across regions and triage escalations, developing scalable resources and playbooks for complex cloud negotiations.
Structure robust data processing agreements, security exhibits, and compliance frameworks in collaboration with Privacy and Cybersecurity teams.
Continuously evaluate and optimize negotiation playbooks and self-service contracting workflows to accelerate sales cycles and unlock revenue.