Infrastructure Architect

Overview

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.

The Role

The Infrastructure Architect is responsible for designing, testing and documenting the fundamental infrastructure build patterns upon which the F5 SaaS business operates. They act as liaisons to internal stakeholders, such as product management, engineering, finance, and procurement. Externally, they collaborate with vendors regarding product roadmaps and emerging hardware and software requirements, while providing strategic guidance to supplier executives on industry trends and product strategies that deliver substantive value to F5 and the broader sector.

The Infrastructure Architect will also be responsible for maintaining existing high-level relationships with F5 customers and suppliers.

F5 Infrastructure Architects are recognized experts in their field – known by name across industry bodies and in corporate boardrooms. Their artifacts reside in some of today s most critical and well-known global infrastructure deployments.

They have lived through operating infrastructure at scale, and their architectural work product incorporates those experiences, thoroughly exploring and solving for scale, availability, operability, simplicity, and tooling. Their designs, documents, and platform selections directly impact the velocity and direction of F5’s SaaS business and influence the work of thousands of people.

They are mentors, and their broad insight is routinely sought after by members of infrastructure engineering, as well as F5 executives, up to and including the CEO. Their communication style is fungible, and they are as comfortable in a boardroom as they are in front of an engineering whiteboard.

They have a heavy execution bias and are keenly aware that an architecture ivory tower is a recipe for failure. They remain engaged with the more operational areas of the company and are not just open to new ideas but also thrive on exploring those ideas and collaborating with others to make them real.

They are driven, highly empathetic, fearlessly kind, and believe in the concept of exhibiting and soliciting personal authenticity without compromise. They never settle for less on culture, people or values. They are radically transparent and always tell the truth to any level of the organization.

Responsibilities

• Design, test, and document the baseline build patterns underpinning F5’s entire SaaS business
• Produce full-scope, tested artifacts that provably enable 99.99% platform availability
• Act as an escalation point and mentor for the engineering teams, ensuring that questions about the solutions you produce are addressed quickly and thoroughly
• Ensure that your solution artifacts are comprehensive, including datacenter footprint, racks, cabling, hardware selection, automation, documentation, runlists, SKUs, configurations, and telemetry
• Your designs span substrates when warranted, and your capabilities are just as exceptional in 3rd party substrates as they are in first party
• Deliver designs that contain clear KPIs and measurement strategies
• Your designs clearly incorporate COGS impact and financial inflection points, helping F5 understand the costs of your proposed architecture over time
• You understand that not everything is a long-term deliverable. Sometimes you’ll need to pivot from a next-generation architectural deliverable to a near-term technical debt retirement ask
• Act as an advocate for infrastructure engineering within F5, ensuring that the org’s requirements are well-understood by partner teams
• Act as F5’s infrastructure expert and advocate within the broader industry. Your credibility in the infrastructure architecture space is unquestioned
• You…