Director, Platform Engineering
About The Position
F5 is seeking a Director of Platform Engineering to lead the architecture, operations, and modernization of compute capacity across its Substrate Engineering organization. The role will evaluate current operations, establish a modernization roadmap, and reorganize the Platform team around automation-first, self-service delivery to reduce operational toil. It combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical guidance across private and hybrid cloud environments and includes partnership in supporting the organization’s path toward FedRAMP readiness. The director is expected to lead with empathy, communicate transparently, develop talent, and foster an inclusive, low-friction engineering environment grounded in F5’s commitment to “be kind.” The position oversees private cloud capacity planning and lifecycle, virtualization and foundational Kubernetes environments, infrastructure automation and delivery pipelines, reliability practices, and cross-functional incident response.
Requirements
- 12 years of progressive experience in infrastructure, DevOps, systems, or platform engineering.
- 7 years of direct engineering leadership experience managing and developing high-performing technical teams.
- A demonstrated track record of evaluating legacy or operational processes and successfully delivering modernization and automation initiatives.
- Strong architectural and operational experience with private cloud or hybrid infrastructure and virtualization platforms.
- Production expertise with container orchestration ecosystems, specifically Kubernetes.
- Deep proficiency with Terraform, configuration management such as Ansible or an equivalent, and modern CI/CD tooling.
- Fluency with scripting and automation languages such as Python, Go, or Bash.
- Proven ability to navigate ambiguity, align cross-functional teams, and reduce organizational friction during transformation.
- Exceptional verbal and written communication skills across technical, compliance, product, and executive stakeholders.
- A calm, structured problem-solving approach during critical platform events and high-pressure situations.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with virtualization platforms such as Proxmox, KVM, or VMware.
- Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
- Working familiarity with federal compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, or SOC 2; alternatively, aptitude and willingness to learn and champion compliance alignment.
- Prior FedRAMP certification is not required.
Responsibilities
- Evaluate existing workflows, tooling, and team structures and create and execute a phased modernization plan.
- Reorganize the platform team around an automation-first, self-service engineering model.
- Lead, mentor, and scale a team of platform and DevOps engineers, fostering continuous learning, psychological safety, collaboration, and accountability.
- Oversee capacity planning, lifecycle management, and operational resilience of private cloud infrastructure, including Proxmox virtualization and foundational Service 0 Kubernetes environments.
- Champion Infrastructure-as-Code, configuration management, and CI/CD pipelines to enable consistent, auditable deployments and reduce manual operational toil.
- Partner with Security, Compliance, and Architecture teams to understand and operationalize FedRAMP requirements across platform systems.
- Establish and track SLOs, SLAs, and platform KPIs.
- Lead cross-functional incident responses and blameless post-mortems to improve platform resilience.
- Navigate ambiguity and align cross-functional teams while reducing organizational friction during transformation.
- Communicate across Product, Architecture, Security, Compliance, and executive stakeholders.
Benefits
- Incentive compensation may be offered.
- Bonus may be offered.
- Restricted stock units may be offered.
- Benefits are offered; the description refers candidates to F5’s benefits page for details.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
