Distinguished (DMTS), Infrastructure Architect

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 operate with an extreme level of independence, making good prioritization decisions based on what you learn from your peers 

• You understand the criticality of relationships, and build them early, up and down the organizational ladder 

• Your requirements gathering processes are very comprehensive, touching not just the technical areas of the company 

• You recognize that success isn't just about creating an architecture, but also seeing your design successfully deployed and operated as designed 

BeF5 Requirements 

• Be kind. 

• You have advanced skills in assessing your audience, allowing you to tailor your questions, responses, and language appropriately for any setting. 

• You take ownership of problems and drive them through to resolution. 

• You build strong relationships with both internal and external customers by communicating transparently and clearly, maintaining composure under pressure, and choosing language that is articulate, empathetic, and respectful. 

• You are a talent magnet. People gravitate to F5 because you’re here. 

• You are highly transparent and have a bias toward over-communication, understanding that the architecture process is iterative and collaborative, not a black box. 

• You understand that large portions of F5 are your customer and ensure that their needs are broadly met by the patterns you produce and solutions you select. 

• F5’s customers see you as an ally, and seek your input about how they should solve their own complex engineering challenges. 

• Your peers come to you with challenges (personal or professional) without fear of judgment or reprisal. They view you as an ally and advocate. 

Technical Requirements  

• You pivot and re-prioritize with grace. 

• Your products are at the optimal intersection of business velocity and safety, demonstrably able to provide 99.99% availability. 

• You weave security into every artifact, never sacrificing customer safety for velocity. 

• You have 12+ years of significant, progressive consumer webscale or multi-national carrier substrate/infrastructure engineering experience. 

• You have designed and fielded infrastructures for the largest and most critical webscale, financial, or carrier deployments on earth.  

• You can confidently and appropriately message status and plans internally and externally. 

• You measure everything and act on data. 

• Not only do you ensure that architecture is not an ivory tower, but you also actively prevent ivory towers. 

• You understand that the availability and security of the F5 SaaS platform is paramount, and when needed, you enthusiastically jump in to help. 

• The quality of your written English language skills is novel-worthy. Your audience will range from highly technical engineering staff, to the CEO of the company.  Your spoken and written language skills are equally exceptional in both forums. 

• You are biased toward automation as a problem remediation vector and as a velocity enabler. 

• You obtain support and consensus using data and experience, not opinion. 

• Your artifacts are not limited to F5 infrastructure; instead, they take into account the wider internet landscape, considering factors such as connectivity strategies, regulatory changes, political conditions, disaster recovery and high availability, as well as supply chains. These artifacts anticipate future developments and offer clear, well-reasoned recommendations.  

• Your knowledge of engineering and operational needs is extremely nuanced and predictive, delivering what your partners across the company need to make F5 and its customers successful. 

• You know who to call in the broader industry when there is a problem outside of our control. 

• You understand the criticality of security engineering and compliance, and partner closely with F5’s CISO organization to ensure that your work products prioritize customer security.